Um ….. here’s a new tool for exploring probability distributions!
Actually, it’s not a new tool exactly, more a re-working of the existing modelling tool I’ve already shared on this blog, but with a new name and web location – the probability distribution explorer! I developed the probability distribution explorer as part of my Masters research into teaching probability distribution modelling. The proposed teaching framework […]
Different strokes?
Recently I’ve been developing and trialling learning tasks where the learner is working with a provided data set but has to do something “human” that motivates using a random sample as part of the strategy to learn something from the data. Since I already had a tool that creates data cards from the Quick, Draw! […]
A simple app that only does three things
Here’s a scenario. You buy a jumbo bag of marshmallows that contains a mix of pink and white colours. Of the 120 in the bag, 51 are pink, which makes you unhappy because you prefer the taste of pink marshmallows. Time to write a letter of complaint to the company manufacturing the marshmallows? The thing […]
Visualising bootstrap confidence intervals and randomisation tests with VIT Online
Simulation-based inference is taught as part of the New Zealand curriculum for Statistics at school level, specifically the randomisation test and bootstrap confidence intervals. Some of the reasons for promoting and using simulation-based inference for testing and for constructing confidence intervals are that: students are working with data (rather than abstracting to theoretical sampling distributions) […]
Cat and whisker plots – sampling from the Quick, Draw! dataset
Last night, I saw a tweet announcing that Google had made data available on over 50 million drawings from the game Quick, Draw! I had never played the game before, but it is pretty cool. The idea behind the game is whether a neural network can learn to recognize doodling – watch the video below for […]
Helping students to estimate mean and standard deviation
Estimating the mean and standard deviation of a discrete random variable is something we expect NZ students to be able to do by the time they finish Year 13 (Grade 12). The idea is that students estimate these properties of a distribution using visual features of a display (e.g. a dot plot) and, ideally, these measures […]
Ideas for using technology to design and carry out experiments online
This post provides the notes for a workshop I ran at the Otago Mathematics Association (OMA) conference about using technology to design and carry out experiments online. Actually, at the moment this post only provides a PDF of the slides I used for the workshop – I will update this post with more detail later this year […]
Initial adventures in Stickland
This post provides the notes for a workshop I ran at the Otago Mathematics Association (OMA) Conference about using data challenges to encourage statistical thinking. Until last week, I had never re-presented or adapted a workshop that I had developed in a previous year. So it really interesting to take this workshop on data challenges, which I […]
Welcome to stickland!
I’ve been working on a little side project for the last year or so. I thought this might be a good time to share this with you, particularly since I probably (with a very high probability) won’t be making any more posts for the rest of the year due a few little things called a […]
Hey! You’ve got to hide that population away …
Back in 2012 was when I first set up an online tool for taking a random sample from a hidden population. I didn’t share or promote this tool at the time because it was always meant to be a short term solution to a short term problem for my department. 2012 in NZ was the first year […]