Ellen Gundlach of Purdue University was selected as the grand prize winner of the ASA Hands-On Statistics Activity Competition for her paper airplane activity in which students experience statistical concepts through making and flying various designs of paper airplanes. Her project will be featured at the ASA booth in October’s USA Science and Engineering Festival on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Gundlach will receive $750 and a trip for two to the festival.
Two activities received the gold medal prize. St. Olaf College students Ashley Petersen and Bryant Torkelson won for their entry teaching linear regression through a marble race machine and a chemical titration experiment. Statistics instructors Kathleen Nirei and Jim Rubasch of the K–12 ‘Iolani school won for their activity of Frisbee throws triggering tennis balls falling though a nail lattice to collectively form a bell-shaped distribution, and then linking that distribution to real-life applications. Each team will receive $500.
Three projects received honorable mentions. Ivo Dinov and Nicolas Christou of UCLA won for their programs allowing students to explore ozone pollution data through a statistical lens. Proctor and Gamble statisticians Tom Filloon, William A. Brenneman, Michael D. Joner, and William R. Myers won for their collection of projects exploring conditional probability, estimation of unknown, the normal distribution, and the probability of consecutive infrequent events. Chamont Wang, a professor at the College of New Jersey, and students Michele Meisner and Meiyi Zheng won for their dynamic data visualization with the data coming from storm tracking, fraud detection, high-school graduation rates, and student exams.
Competition participants represented the ASA membership well: statistics teachers, undergraduate students, professors, industry statisticians … Grand prize winner Gundlach is a continuing lecturer and course coordinator. While completing her degrees in chemistry (BS from Florida State University, MS from The Ohio State University), she realized the fun part of science for her is designing the experiments, analyzing the results, and explaining what those results mean, which as she put it, “is exactly what statisticians do!”
Torkelson begins studies this fall at the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy. UCLA statistics professor Dinov is the chief operations officer of the Center for Computational Biology and director of the Statistics Online Computational Resource. He received a 2007 World Wide Web Gold Award.
The competition requested activities to attract students to the upcoming ASA booth in Washington, DC, and stimulate an interest in statistics. The winning projects can be found here. Because the quality was so high for all entries, those not chosen as winners were encouraged to adapt their entries for STatistics Education Web (STEW), the online repository for K–12 statistics lesson plans.
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