Stat Chat for 23 Feb. 2010

Agenda

• 6:00 - 6:30, Dinner


• 6:30 - 7:10, Journal club. Marsha Lovett and Joel Greenhouse, Applying Cognitive Theory to Statistics Instruction The American Statistician, 54(3):1-11. Alicia Johnson will moderate the discussion.


• 7:10 - 8:00, Main Event: Sandra J. Moen, Teaching Experimental Design with a Paper Helicopter

  To paraphrase George Box, "All toys are fun; some toys are useful."
  

  The speaker "played" with helicopters in her graduate-school days when she worked for Prof. Box as a graduate assistant one year, and since then she has used them in statistics classes at 3M with good success with both technically-minded and not-so-technically-minded students.
  

  Drawing on Box's article from 1991, Teaching Engineers Experimental Design with a Paper Helicopter, there will be a brief introduction to the problem, presentation of a few ideas of how to incorporate it as an exercise in class to illustrate different types of statistical tools and questions, and then it's flight time! Try it out for yourself.