Abstract:

A methodology to teach the topics of interval estimation and hypothesis testing for means, difference of means, proportions and difference of proportions with large sample sizes is presented. The proposal establishes four stages. During the first stage, students play with a set of spheres of different colors in a square. Data are taken from the spheres that are placed in the first line and the students explore data and they try to guess the number of spheres in the square. The same game is played with spheres in a cube. In the second stage the process is generalized through computational simulations. Subsequently, the theory is discussed and exercises in class are solved. In the last stage, students' knowledge is evaluated through an online activity.

The simulation was developed in Excel, taking advantage of the Visual-Basic features. The idea is to generate random numbers with different types of distribution. Depending on the results, spheres are colored on a line or on a plane and displayed to the user.

Subsequently, the system asks questions about the results and the activity is evaluated. In this work, the simulation development in Excel and the results obtained with students who took a Basic Statistics course are presented.

Keywords:

Hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, Excel.