Using Google Docs to Teach Statistics

In the spirit of sharing, here’s a lesson that I’m using with my Math B30 students right now.  We’re working on Data Analysis (Stats), and in particular, the normal distribution and related probabilities.  I was getting a bit tired of the dated examples in the text, so I thought I’d create my own problem with the students.

Each student will do a poll of other students in the school, with each student getting a minimum of 20 results.  The two questions they are asking are:

• how many hours do you watch TV in an average week?
• how many hours are you on the Internet in an average week (surfing, email, IMing, Facebook, YouTube, etc.)?

Each student will then post their results to a Google Docs spreadsheet I set up (one spreadsheet per class, like this one) that anyone can edit (to eliminate the need for them to log in).  After all of the students have added their results to the Google Docs spreadsheet, they can then use the aggregate data to perform the statistical calculations required (z-scores, what these results mean to a school population that we assume is normally distributed).

The handout that I’m giving the kids is available here.  I’ll let you know how it goes.