Abstract:

Statistics in Industrial Design Engineering is a subject of the second semester of the first course. The number of students in this subject is nearly 200 students, 120 of them are new students (there are two groups). This subject is included in a project for the adaptation of the Bologna Declaration in Spain. This subject should cover the basic concepts in Statistics that students will need in following subjects: Descriptive Statistics, Probability and Inference, in 137 hours, 60 of them are in the classroom or laboratory. In order to make students work the most basic concepts (sampling and description of data) and thinking skills, I have designed a webquest [1] where they are critical citizens. It is a long webquest, which students can develop in ten weeks (without considering three weeks of holidays that they have during the second semester) outside the classroom, in a team of 4 students. In Engineering, unfortunately, there are usually few female students. However, the number of female students is similar to the male students in Industrial Design Engineering. The webquest starts with a video of the great series “Against all odds: inside Statistics” [2], the chapter 3, Describing Distributions, where an illustrative example shows how a city government used statistical methods to correct inequity between men’s and women’s salaries, in the eighties, in USA. Students should investigate the wage gap in the present, making and analyzing a small survey, and using the official data of the INE (Spanish Institute of Statistics), where they should collect among other variables, the number of hours devoted to work at home. This is a coeducative webquest, where students should investigate also a brilliant woman that using Statistics managed to save a lot of lives: Florence Nightingale. The rest of activities in the webquest considers also subjects that are on everyone’s lips, such as climate change through ecological footprints, and points where they can find Statistics in their daily life, for example in clinical analysis, bad use of Statistics in the media, or making a complaint to the city government because bad estimations in water consumption mean paying more in the invoice (this is based on a real history where thanks to Statistics the money was given back to the citizen). In the webquest, there are also research activities for seeing the importance of Statistics in Industrial Design, in particular in Ergonomics. They are devoted to the description of relationships: regression line and principal component analysis through the accommodation of pilots in aircraft design [3].
The students are working in this webquest during this semester, I will collect data about their experience and opinion in order to improve and modify this webquest for the next year.

REFERENCES
[1] Dodge, B. (1995). Some thoughts about WebQuests. Updated May 5, 1997. Available: http://webquest.sdsu.edu/about_webquests.html

[2] Against all odds: inside Statistics. ISBN: 1-55946-091-1. http://www.learner.org/catalog/series65.html.

[3] Zehner, G.F., Meindl, R.S., and Hudson, J.A. (1993). A Multivariate Anthropometric Method for Crew Stations Design: Abridged, AL-TR-1992-0164, Armstrong Laboratory, Air Force Systems Command, Wright Patterson Air Force Base, OH.

Keywords:

Webquest, Coeducation, Statistics in Engineering.