7.1 The shape of random variation
The starting concept was to roll one, two, and then three dice mapping the results onto the white board to show the distributions. This morphed minutes before class into passing out a single die to 12 student pairs and having the students tally data into a shared spreadsheet. The concept worked, with the complication that different individuals, and pairs, moved at vastly different paces through the data. With some working as pairs and others as individuals, there were only nine dice being rolled. Because the spreadsheet included the distribution for 12 dice, the data was padded using three columns containing the function =int(rand()*6+1). In retrospect this felt like a kludge. Karen and Kimilane started as a pair, and then were each given their own column to add another student generated data column. The Smartboard proved problematic with high latency - adding a column was difficult. Perhaps this was in part that nine groups were entering data to...
