Abstract
Teaching introductory statistics is a service requirement for many mathematics faculty, and the audience is often anxious about the subject and not always excited about the material. Making class fun, relevant, and visually stimulating is key to keeping students engaged in the material and also in promoting student learning. Collecting data from the students, be it demographic information or experimental data, can achieve this, and immediately invites the students to be interested in the data and motivated to answer-related research questions. To facilitate and speed up this process, we developed the free data collection and analysis platform Classroom Stats which is designed to make class more fun and to improve student learning through straightforward visual analysis of the data. In this paper, we will discuss the importance of using student generated data in class and how to use Classroom Stats to make the process easy and efficient.
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Notes on contributors
Adam F. Childers
Adam Childers enjoys working on creating data collection and visualization applications for teaching statistics and for sports analytics. Outside of math, he enjoys cycling, gardening, and spending time with his family.
David G. Taylor
David Taylor is passionate about higher education and pedagogy. He has taught a variety of mathematics, statistics, and general education courses and won the Roanoke College exemplary teaching award from the Dean's office in 2011. He enjoys working with the Institute for Policy and Opinion Research on campus, spending as much time with his dog as possible, and cooperative board games.