Having Fun with Statistics
Douglas Butler explores the use of ICT in the teaching and learning of statistics. First he sources some useful data on the web, then offers ways of using Excel and Autograph to bring it to life.
Great data from the web
The web is heaving with data, but it is sometimes difficult to find good data, and to extract it usefully. This page offers a selection of sites that have proved to be useful for the classroom, culled from the Statistics section of the TSM Resources site.
Putting Excel to work with data
Having found some good data, what to do with it? Excel has gone through several iterations since I first came across it in the mid-90s, but its statistical functions are much the same, and of course it gobbles up calculations with no fuss!
Putting Excel to work with data
Putting Autograph to work with data
Although Autograph is principally a coordinate geometry package, it does handle data in both single-variable mode and bi-variate. It can also tackle the tricky concepts of discrete and continuous variables, and also frequency and frequency density when the classes are unequal.
Putting Autograph to work with data
Having fun with Google Earth and the Wind Stats website
Why are airport runways built in a certain direction? Ideally planes like to take off and land into the wind. The Wind Stats website gives the prevailing wind as a circular histogram, and Google Earth can zoom in on a runway - did they get it right? We fly to the little coastal town of Mackay in Queensland to find out.
