Ask Slashdot: Resources For Explaining Statistics For the Very First Time? (thejuliagroup.com)

theodp writes: Teaching multivariate statistics to college students, writes AnnMaria De Mars, was a piece of cake compared to her current project — making a game to teach statistics to middle school students who have never been exposed to the idea. In the interest of making a better game, De Mars asks, "Here's my question to you, oh reader people, what resources have you found useful for teaching statistics? I mean, resources you have really watched or used and thought, 'Hey, this would be great for teaching?' There is a lot of mediocre, boring stuff on the interwebz and if any of you could point me to what you think rises above the rest, I'd be super appreciative." Larry Gonick's The Cartoon Guide to Statistics is pretty amazing, but is it a little too advanced for this age group? Anyone have experience with the Khan Academy Data and Statistics offerings? Any other ideas?

Comments

why should they care?

[serviscope_minor]

What is there in statistics to make someone of that age care about it?

Teach them some dice based game, get them to play each other and mix in some loaded dice at random.

Tell them half way through and get them to figure out who is the cheat. Naturally they won't get it right as intuition about statistics is usually poor, but your job is to guide them into the right direction.

Re:M&M Fun Packs

[Xest]

I think the problem is that statistics is a far more detailed and complicated topic than that, and that the sort of thing you suggested is the sort of thing that's already taught well, but such a tiny miniscule tip of the iceberg that it's the rest of it that needs be taught.

I agree with the person below who mentioned intuition, mostly the biggest problem I see when it comes to statistics amongst people of every age and group is that very few people seem to grasp the issues that may face a statistical result. People in general struggle to understand what the numbers actually mean, they're hopeless at figuring out what confounding factors may exist in a result.

So might I suggest a decent idea might be to find some bad statistical studies and create some exercises that help them understand why they're bad. The examples don't need to be difficult, but should be varied to help them understand why correlation does not mean causation, and why causation doesn't even necessarily imply (at least linear) correlation amongst other things.

Wikipedia's list would probably provide a reasonable starting point for some examples to cover:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I'd suggest, that by teaching kids how to question statistics, and how to spot when someone is using statistics to spout bullshit (which you'll find happens all the fucking time, basically every single day of your life if you're adept at spotting it) they'll be better placed to learn how to do statistics properly.

If they know how to tell when a result is wrong, they'll hopefully be encouraged to find out how to do it right, and how to mitigate these issues. I think without ever learning to recognise how people do statistics wrong on a daily basis, it's hard to know how to do it right, and so the issue just proliferates.