statistics is awesome

Last week, I was fortunate to be down in Ōtautahi Christchurch to run a series of workshops for the CMA (Cantebury Mathematical Association) in my role as a NZAMT (New Zealand Association of Mathematics Teachers) Bevan Werry speaker. Two of the workshops were ones I had run during 2024 with teachers in Whangārei for the NMA (Northland Mathematics Association) and teachers in Tauranga for the…

Recently I had the pleasure of chatting with one of our amazing learning designers (Dr Evija Trofimova) at Waipapa Taumata Rau (University of Auckland) about the undergraduate data technologies course I teach (STATS 220). Evija then wrote a teaching story based on some of the pedagogical approaches I have been using in this course, which you can read here. Yes, it features cats (including a photo…

Exploring YouTube auto-captions - an example of a personal data exploration based on lecture recordings :-)

Back in June, I gave a five minute talk as part of the opening session of USCOTS – the U.S. Conference On Teaching Statistics. We were warned to practice our talks to make sure we keep to our time limit, which made me wonder how many words I could actually fit into five-minute talk. Since recordings are made for my lectures, I had this idea to explore the number of words I use when teaching, by…

Thinking about what it means to explore data, and how to teach students to explore data, has become a passion of mine ever since I started exploring teaching with a wider range of data. It started back in 20151, when I worked on rewriting a set of lectures for our very large introductory statistics course at the University of Auckland for a new chapter called “Exploring data”. A paper I wrote and…

What?! A tool I made for high school statistics students is being used by "actual" researchers. A new post on my teaching blog with an example of an experiment conducted online using the random redirect tool (allocate.monster)

A few years back, I created the first version of the random redirect tool that now lives at allocate.monster. I developed the tool to support New Zealand statistics students to conduct questionnaire-based experiments online, but soon started getting emails from Masters/PhD student and “actual” researchers about using the tool. I think that’s pretty cool, and just shows how connected the…

Exploring data landscapes and so much more - customising student data learning opportunities!

It was awesome to be one of the opening speakers at this year’s US Conference on Teaching Statistics this morning at 4am – thank you again Allan Rossman and Kelly McConville for the invitation! Each of the speakers had five minutes to share something related to the conference theme of Broadening horizons, and all of the other speakers in this session gave amazing talks. You’ll soon be able to…

Stats with Cats (and other animals)! A collection of posts and videos from me and others,

I wrote a guest post earlier this week for Allan Rossman’s excellent blog Ask Good Questions. If you aren’t already subscribed to Allan’s blog you should be! He spent a year writing a new post every week, so there are so many very good advice and ideas for teaching statistics on his blog. Allan’s work with Beth Chance on teaching simulation-based inference has influenced a lot of what we teach in…

A small sample of ideas - just some of the answers I've tried to provide to questions in the NZ stats and maths teacher Facebook groups recently.

While I continue to decide whether to quit Facebook, I’ve been trying to keep on top of my admin responsibilities for the Stats Teachers NZ Facebook group while keeping an eye on any stats-related posts on the NZ Maths teachers Facebook group. Since not everyone is on Facebook, I thought I’d do a quick post sharing some of the ideas for teaching stats I’ve recently shared within these groups.

Introducing a new sub blog for teaching large introductory statistics courses: Go big or go home!

On Tuesday, my good friend Dr Michelle Dalrymple won this year’s Prime Minister’s Science Teacher award. It was so great to be able to fly down to Christchurch with Maxine Pfannkuch to watch the live streaming of the award ceremony with Michelle, her family and her colleagues at Cashmere High School. Michelle was the first mathematics and statistics teachers to win the prize, and it couldn’t have…

Actually, it’s not a new tool exactly, more a re-working of the existing modelling tool I’ve already shared on this blog, but with a new name and web location – the probability distribution explorer!

I developed the probability distribution exploreras part of my Masters research into teaching probability distribution modelling. The proposed teaching framework and the tool were developed in…

Follow the data: some quick notes, the slides and a (bad) recording of my keynote at #NZAMT16 @nzamt #datascied #statsed #ds4e

Last week I was down in Wellington for the VUW NZCER NZAMT16 Mathematics & Statistics Education Research Symposium, as well as for the NZAMT16teacher conference. It was a huge privilege to be one of the keynote speakers and my keynote focused on teaching data science at the school level. I used the example of following music data from the New Zealand Top 40 charts to explore what new ways of…

Just a short post on my neglected blog, with a summary of some past/future talks/workshops I'm doing over the next month or so :-) #statsed #datascied

I’m pretty excited about the talks and workshops I’m doing over the next month or so! Below are the summaries or abstracts for each talk/workshop and when I get a chance I’ll write up some of the ideas presented in separate posts.

Keynote: Searching for meaningful sampling in apple orchards, YouTube videos, and many other places! (AMA, Auckland, September 14, 2019)

In this talk, I shared…

I made a simple app that only does three things. My students enjoyed using it (and getting to eat marshmallows) before learning how to run and then code their own simulations. Let me know what you think! #statsed #datascied

Here’s a scenario. You buy a jumbo bag of marshmallows that contains a mix of pink and white colours. Of the 120 in the bag, 51 are pink, which makes you unhappy because you prefer the taste of pink marshmallows.

Time to write a letter of complaint to the company manufacturing the marshmallows?

The thing we work so hard to get our statistics students to believe is that there’s this…

If you’ve been keeping track of my various talks & workshops over the last year or so, you will have noticed that I’ve become a little obsessed with analysing images (see power of pixels and/or read more here).  As part of my PhD research, I’ve been using images to broaden students’ awareness of what is data, and data science, and it’s been so much fun!

If you’re in the Auckland area next week,…

You say data, I say data cards .... dot-shaped data cards! Also, more sampling fun times using Google's Quick! Draw! dataset #statsed #datacards #statisticsisawesome

This long weekend (in Auckland anyway!), I spent some time updating the Quick! Draw! sampling tool (read more about it here Cat and whisker plots: sampling from the Quick, Draw! dataset). You may need to clear your browser cache/data to see the most recent version of the sampling tool.

One of the motivations for doing so was a visit to my favourite kind of store – a stationery store – where I…