AIMS Materials: Models and Modeling
Introduction to the Lessons
There are three lessons designed to help students develop an understanding of the importance and use of statistical models. The first lesson has student model birth outcomes in a situation where there is a “one-son policy”. A probability model is used to simulate data which is summarized to answer some research questions. The second activity in this lesson has students use first a physical and then a computer simulation to model the “Let’s Make a Deal” game, using the simulated data to find the best strategy for playing the game. The second lesson has students create models for the different random devices and use these to simulate data to generate and compare probability distributions, where each has a different shape and expected value. The third lesson introduces the normal distribution as a model of a probability distribution. This model is used to fit to samples of data and to demonstrate when it is appropriate to use this model in analyzing data.
Models and Modeling Materials
The AIMS materials for the topic of models and modeling include several different zipped folders. Each folder contains the relevant materials for this topic. There is also a PDF file of the topic's sequence of ideas and associated activities. All materials can be accessed by selecting the icon to the right of the file description.
