Plan: more Excel, mean, median and mode. I’d like to find a way to work on percentiles, distributions, bell curve and standard deviation – material in the text that I’ve never taught. I don’t know how I can do that in a flipped classroom …
What we did: the Erdos number example. Working with two or three students at a time, the tutor and I could explain how the summary data in the table was built (in principle) from a list of all the mathematicians, each with his or her number. If you had that list you could find the mean and the median with Excel functions =AVERAGE() and =MEDIAN() (and, in this special case, =MODE() would work too). With only the summary data, you have to think about the full table hypothetically – hence a new column for =(Erdos #)*(# of mathematicians), which you then sum. (The questions about standard deviation and about Erdos number infinity are too hard. I need to remove them.)
This is all done/explained in the book, and done/explained in class last week. I’ve told them it will be on the exam. Nevertheless, I’m sure several people (lots?) will just use the built in Excel functions.
Finished the class talking a little bit about skewed distributions.
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