Abstract:

Statistics is considered nowadays as one of the most relevant areas of knowledge for social and natural sciences. In spite of the key role of statistics for a wide range of scientific areas, university students usually struggle when facing statistics related subjects. As a result, we have designed six entertaining manipulative activities to make statistics more attractive for students. These tasks are conceived to engage students in the subject and to help them to understand basic concept of statistics avoiding the abstraction that characterises statistics. Thus, by using manipulative task the basic statistics phenomena are made concrete and the teaching-learning process will be improved. For sure, those students highly motivated would not need these tasks but we think they will take advantage from them to gain a deeper understanding of these basic and key statistical concepts. The six tasks we provide are graded and hierarchically presented in order to develop the syllabi of an introductory course of statistics. Task one is designed to show students that the average mean can be interpreted as the centre of gravity or the centre of mass in physical terms. This is essential to understand current trends in statistical analysis and it helps to understand more complex models based on the logic of generalised linear models. The purpose of the second task is to show some properties of the mean as compared with the median and the mode. These properties will be observed by using repeated sampling from cards or objects resembling normal populations. Repeated sampling is also used to empirically show the central limit theorem (task three) and the meaning of the classical p-value (task five). Task four is about the classic, aprioristic and frequentist understanding of probability. To practise with these concepts a wooden made board and marbles are used to emulate a binomial (biased and free of bias) distribution. Finally, the last task is thought to help students to get familiar with the Bayesian interpretation of probability just by using a French cards trick.

Keywords:

Statistics, entertainment, attitudes, active methodology, probability.