 What does it take to get students interested in statistics? According to Herbie Lee, associate professor of statistics and mathematics at the University of California, the answer is chocolate chip cookies. For example, rather than the traditional M&Ms or Hershey's Kisses, he hands out a cookie to each student and has them count the number of chocolate chips in each (requiring, of course, the student to consume the "waste"). The results generally follows a Poisson distribution, which introduces them to the concepts of variability. The cookies make frequent reappearances when he discusses testing methods. For example, two brands of cookies get compared using a t-test.
For those who are interested, you can read about his chocolate-chip cookie methods in Volume 61, Issue 4 of the American Statistician. A PDF of the paper can be found at his web site at http://www.ams.ucsc.edu/~herbie/ |
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