Roxanne
Ann

Homework 6

We looked at a number of textbooks and teach-ware software packages before we chose the interactive tools that we wanted to use in our lecture. The sites that we looked at included:

These are the tools that we decided to use, (or might have if time allowed):

http://www.cyberk.com/1.0/B-2/exercises.html

We thought this one would be useful for an introductory statistics lecture due to its simplicity and understandability. It provides, both graphically, and numerically the probability of getting a certain color of M&M when you pull one out of the bag. This intergrated well with the topics that we initially wanted to cover (e.g. probability of a single event, intersection, union, mutual exclusion etc.). This was desirable as we felt that we wanted to decide on the topics that would be best to present to the class, and then find web-based tools to facilitate our presentation, instead of finding the tools and working our topics and theory around them. The web-site also provided questions for the students that referred to the applet. These aided the students understanding of the concepts, and gave us a good opportunity to initiate class involvement and interaction in the lecture. The CyberGnostics site also provided an excellent introductory self- assessed test on probability concepts at:

http://www.cyberk.com/1.0/B-1/self_assess.html

Overall, we found this site to be excellent in providing good interactive tools, clear and understandable description of the concepts in the text, and good exercises and practice tests.

We also used the statistics site from West Virginia University:

http://student.stat.wvu.edu/SRS/Modules/ProbDef/urn.html

This applet allowed students to look at the probability of getting a certain number of colored balls from a population with or without replacement. The initial conditions can be set by the student (ie. N- the population size, n- the sample size, P- the probability of getting a certain color ball from the population (this equals the proportion of that color of ball in the population), and whether sampling would be done with or without replacement). This allowed the student to manipulate all the initial conditions to assess the effect of each on these individually on the results. The web-site provided a very good overview of the theory behind sampling with and without replacement using an example from the applet. This was an excellent addition for students that wanted to review the material on their own after class. Again, the applet provided good opportunity for class participation and interaction.

The site from SticiGui at Berkeley also provided good information and interactive tools:

http://www.stat.Berkeley.EDU/users/stark/SticiGui/Text/index.htm

In this applet (Let's Make a Deal) the student must try to guess which of three doors a prize is behind. If the student picked a door that did not contain the prize, he/she can then change his/her guess to the remaining door. The web-page described the theory behind the game of a 3-door choice with a switching option, and clearly presented the historical arguments for and against the idea that switching would be advantageous. They show the fallacy in the latter argument and give their own proof of the former. This description brings in a number of important statistical concepts, and does it in a fun way as it is associated with a game. We thought this was an excellent interactive tool; however, it was too complex to describe in the time we had, and we thus chose not to present it.

Sites that we did not incorporate into our lecture are as follows:

Hyperstat ( http://www.davidmlane.com/hyperstat)

Although the Hyperstat textbook covers many topics well, we found that their coverage of probability was not extensive. There were no interactive tools within this site, however their links to other sites did facilitate our search for good interactive tools to use in our lecture.

The GASP Initiative ( http://www.stat.sc.edu/rsrch/gasp/):

This site provided links to statistical analysis tools that were not useful to us, but it also had links to applets which would be useful when preparing a lecture on an introductory statistics topic. The applets available included the 'Lets make a deal' applet, however we had already examined this applet within the SticiGui textbook and decided that the concepts would have been a bit too complex to describe within our time frame, and so we decided against using anything from this site.

VassarStats ( http://faculty.vassar.edu/~lowry/VassarStats.html):

This site from Vasser provided a good overview of some issues of probability, and it also provided sections where a student could make calculations and could work with some interactive tools. We found these to be of good quality, but did not have time to incorporate them into our lecture.

UCLA Statistical Calculators ( http://www.stat.ucla.edu/calculators/):

These calculators did not involve many probability issues, and would not likely make a useful teaching tool in a short lecture in any case, and thus were not useful to us in our lecture.

Balasubramanian Narasimhan's JAVA Applets ( http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~naras/jsm/):

This site allowed assess to a number of applets involving numerous topics of statistics. The only one which was relevant at all to our topic was one that allows the student to find the probabilities under the density curve (see http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~naras/jsm/FindProbability.html). We did not think that this would facilitate our teaching of the topics that we had chosen for our lecture, however, and thus we decided against incorporating it.

UCLA Statistics Electronic Textbook ( http://www.stat.ucla.edu/textbook):

This textbook did not have any discrete chapters on probability, although it did have some small pieces of information on probability topics interwoven into other larger topics (e.g. at http://www.stat.ucla.edu/textbook/bivariables/gendarme). This made it somewhat difficult to use the textbook for our topic. In addition, when I clicked on a link that was supposed to lead me to a demo, quite often all I would get was a file of code.

Seeing Statistics ( http://www.seeingstatistics.com):

This textbook only has chapter 1 (an introductory chapter), and chapter 7 (a chapter on normal distribution) available (unless you had paid for the text), and was thus no help to us in developing a lecture on probability.

Media Activities Book for Moore $ McCabe's Introduction to the Practice of Statistics ( http://ww3.whfreeman.com/test/statistics/applets.html):

This site had only a limited selection of topics- it covered mean and median, the normal curve, displaying and describing one variable distributions, correlation and regression, and expected values (mean of a random variable). While the site had some good applets to use within these topics, there was nothing here that was useful for us.

Surfstat ( http://surfstat.newcastle.edu.au/surfstat/gateway.cgi):

This textbook had a chapter on variation and probability that contained an extensive amount of theory on probability issues. However, we had already gathered the theory that we desired to present. There were a couple of applets within the chapter, but they were less useful than others we found, and fit less well with the topics of probability that we wanted to cover so we decided against using them.

Electronic textbook by StatSoft ( http://www.statsoft.com/textbook/stathome.html):

This textbook seems to be directed at statistics students which are already familiar with the basic topics of statistics, and thus there was no discrete section on probability in the textbook. We attempted to search for probability using the search engine, but we found only issues that were related to more complex topics, and thus we did not find anything that was useful for our lecture.