Cookies in the Classroom: Specific Instructions for Implementation

• Activity Number: 260
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 5, 2013 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Wilmina Siegfried*+ and Ulrike Genschel and Juliane Janek
• Companies: Iowa State University and Iowa State University and Iowa State University
• Keywords: Undergraduate Education ; Cookies ; Lesson Plan

Abstract

Getting students interested in introductory statistics is a concern shared by many instructors. One current suggestion asks students to collect data from store-bought cookies during class to experience data collection and provide data for use in future lessons. Herbert K. H. Lee's article, "Chocolate Chip Cookies as a Teaching Aid" motivated the work presented here. Through a review of current literature and the collected experience of these three authors, Lee's original idea has been extended to encompass multiple types of cookies (chocolate chip, M&M, and triple chocolate) as well as easily collect more information about each cookie. Additionally, we have refined our ideas into three newly designed, easy to implement lesson plans with supporting materials. These lesson plans, which focus on data collection, graphical summaries and numerical summaries, are immediately ready for a 100-level liberal arts introductory statistics class. Instructional objectives across the lessons include: the importance of measurement units and accuracy, correct construction and description of bar charts, pie charts, histograms and scatterplots, and proper use and calculation of numerical summaries.