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Learning statistics through online games

Published:
November 18, 2016

Whether it’s high school football scores, the latest political poll, or the amount of ice melt in the Arctic Sea, data — and statistics — are everywhere.

Helping students learn to “think with data” is one reason Shonda Kuiper, professor of math and statistics and an expert in statistics pedagogy, thinks real-world, unstructured datasets are so important.

And that’s where online games come in for students in Math 209: Applied Statistics.

“Games are engaging,” Kuiper says, “but they also allow students to develop their own research questions, use their own unique data to make decisions, view simulated results based upon their choices, and then connect their simulated experiences to actual published studies.”

In class, students use a simple game to determine whether color influences the completion time within a game. (Try Shapesplosion yourself.)

Working in pairs, Kuiper’s students flip a coin to randomly select which matching game they’ll play first.

In both games, the object is to match each peg with its appropriately shaped hole. In one version of the game, the pegs and the holes are the same color.

The other game has a distractor. Some pegs are different colors from their holes.

While each student plays, the game records multiple variables, such as the number of clicks, type of game played, level of difficulty, and length of play. This information is the data the students will analyze.

After several minutes of game playing in class, Kuiper shows all the data collected.

“What should we do with this data to get the values we’re interested in?” Kuiper asks. She points out errors within the data. Is it reliable? “If we keep this observation within our dataset, will we be biasing our results?

“It is essential to carefully consider how the data are collected and the context of the study before drawing conclusions,” Kuiper adds.

This is an example of real data. It’s often messy and ambiguous. And that’s in stark contrast to the carefully curated datasets collected by professionals that are usually included with textbooks.

One reason games are so effective, Kuiper says, is that they “get students to think very differently about the data they collect. Students start asking questions they don’t typically ask when using textbook datasets.”

Making data collection and analysis relevant to students, through games, helps them learn to ask the right questions.

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