eeps Resources
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For resources on books, see the book pages directly:

Fresno teachers, welcome! Look for the yellow box below for material specific to you. You're welcome to look through the other materials as well, of course.

 

My blog, A Best-Case Scenario. Mostly about high-school statistics and modeling.

A set of videos about probability I made for my high-school (not AP) statistics class.

a page from Henri Piccioto on middle grades math.

Activities and materials from SERP. Check it out!

The Desmos Graping Calculator.

Data Games. Victory though data analysis!


100 kB

Chips and Dip
This pdf describes a magical old math activity that's really about cooperation and the Tragedy of the Commons.


1.2 MB

Linear models from EGADs
This is an early-2014 compilation of activities from EGADs (see below) that focus on linear situations. (Handed out in FUSD February 2014.)


100 kB

Paragraphs
The fabulous paragraphs activity. It's free! You have permission to copy it.


3.2 MB

Grade 7 Sampling
These three activities form the backbone of a unit on sampling appropriate to Grade 7. (Handed out at the workshop in FUSD, April 2014.)

  • The Bean Counters. Sample from a collection of beans to learn the proportion of different kinds of beans.
  • Words on a Page. What's the average length of a word in a large page of text? Clearly, we should sample. But how? This activity uses three different techniques, and we find out which one is better.
  • Estimating the Crowd. Estimate the size of a crowd of people in a photograph. Learn how hard it is!

1.5 MB

Grade 7 & 8 Area and Volume
This packet describes Common Core content about area and volume in grades 7 and 8, with commentary on what's hard and what the terms really mean. Includes some examples incluing the "home plate" investigation. (Handed out at the workshop in FUSD, June 2014.)


480 kB

Grade 7 & 8 Polygon Areas
This packet contains the student and teacher pages for an activity in which students find the areas of polygons inscribed in a circle. We stat with triangles and work our way up. By the time we get to 360 sides, we've derived a formula for the area of a circle. (Handed out at the workshop in FUSD, June 2014.)


800 kB

The Tinkertoy Derivation
Here is the derivation we refer to in the EGADS "Tinkertoy" activity. It derives the general form for going from a linear recurrence relation to its analytic counterpart. We didn't know what that meant either until we needed it to analyze the lengths of Tinkertoys.


450 kB

Annals of Plausibility
You're teaching high-school or college physics. You want to assign open-ended investigations, but you need some structure. Here is a collection of "fake" physics papers. We propose these as an interesting genre of assignment. Students are to respond to a more-or-less theoretical paper by designing an experiment to test the theory. Ideally, they write a paper—in the same style—as a response.

Oh: and while all of the papers are believable, every last one is wrong.

We're tentatively calling it Annals of Plausibility. Send us papers of your own—and student work— and we will post them!

Erickson, Tim. 2019. "Finding the Period in Periodic Data: Wave Slicing and the Modulo Operator." Digital Experiences in Mathematics Eduction. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40751-018-0047-2
[pdf] Read-only version of published paper. Thanks, Springer!.

Erickson, Tim and Triggs, Mariel. 2014. "An Early Look at Rich Learning Analytics: Statistics Students Playing Markov." International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS9), Flagstaff, Arizona, July 2014.
[pdf] download preprint PDF, 300 kB.

Erickson, Tim. 2014. "Nuts, Snook, Babies, and Nuts." In Sprösser, et al., eds, Daten, Zufall, und der Rest der Welt. Wiesbaden: Springer Spektrum.
This is a book chapter about modeling using nearly-cubic functions. The basic situation asks how the weight of hexnuts depends on their size. We discuss why it ought to be cubic, and why it turns out not to be.
[pdf] download preprint PDF, 1.2 MB. visit the publisher's site

Erickson, Tim. 2013. "Caging the Capybara: Understanding Functions through Modeling." In Wassong, et al., eds, Using Tools for Learning Mathematics and Statistics. pp 85–96. Wiesbaden: Springer Spektrum.
This book chapter shows seven different approaches to a classic optimization problem. We approach it at different levels of abstraction, and see how thinking about it in these ways gives us insight into how students can learn to use abstract symbols by starting with simple materials, measurement, and data.
[pdf] download preprint PDF, 566 kB. visit the publisher's site

Erickson, Tim. 2010. "Exploring Risk Using Data." International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS8), Ljubljana, Slovenia, July 2010.
We explore expected value and risk, using the Data Game Floyd's of Fargo.
[pdf] download PDF, 613 kB.

Erickson, Tim. 2008. "A Pretty Good Fit." The Mathematics Teacher 102(4), pp 256–262. Reston, VA: NCTM. This article is about the conceptual advantages of using sliders and residuals over automatic least-squares fitting.
Go to Journal's Site

Erickson, Tim. 2008. "Informal Inference: a science connection." Paper presented at ICME-8 in Monterrey, Mexico. How the logic of inference mirrors that in the scientific method.
here!-> download PDF, 165 kB

Erickson, Tim. 2007. "Wave Slicing: Exploring Periodic Functions." Finding the period of periodic data by chopping it up and dynamically superimposing the slices. Way cool use of Fathom or Logger Pro.
here!-> Wave Slicing(152 kB)

Erickson, Tim and Ayars, Eric. 2005. "Fake Papers as Investigation Prompts." Physics Education 40 550–555. This is a paper about using fake papers like the ones above in the Annals of Plausibility.
Go to Journal's Site

Erickson, Tim. 2005. "Stealing from Physics: Modeling with Mathematical Functions in Data-Rich Contexts." Teaching Mathematics and its Applications. 25 23–32. Also presented at ICME-2004.
Go to Journal's Site

Tim's talk at NCNAAPT, Gunn HS, Palo Alto, November 2004.
"When you have to think inside the box."
Look at the paper, Thinking Inside the Box(1.2 MB [pdf]) (same as the one below)

Bryan Cooley's MASTERS research!
" Student Challenges Integrating Math and Physics with Data Analysis"

Erickson, Tim. 2004. "Ntigrams: special-purpose histograms that solve some pernicious problems" soon to be submitted somewhere. where you think it belongs! Teaching Statistics? Do not cite without permission.
DOWNLOAD NOW (120 kB [pdf])

Erickson, Tim. 2004. "A Fresh Start for Science Labs: Three Springboards to Inquiry" soon to be submitted somewhere. where you think it belongs! Science Teacher? Do not cite without permission.
DOWNLOAD NOW (100 kB [pdf])

Erickson, Tim. 2004. "Thinking Inside the Box: A Normal-Force Experiment Yields Unexpected Insights" Submitted to The Physics Teacher. Do not cite without permission.
DOWNLOAD NOW (1.2 MB [pdf])

Erickson, Tim. 2004. "Learning about Functions in a Data-Rich Environment." Submutted to ICME-2004, but it turned out they only let you submit one. So cite this site for now.
DOWNLOAD NOW (320 kB [pdf])

Erickson, Tim. 2002. "Technology, Statistics, and Subtleties of Measurement: Bridging the Gap Between Science and Mathematics." Presented at the 6th International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS-6).
Go to HTML version

Our NSF/SBIR Phase I final report,
"Integrating Mathematics and Science through Data" [pdf]

 

Here we put links to a few useful files.
left arrow A Fathom Skew and Kurtosis file. right arrow

 

Notes from Tim's AAPT 2003 presentation about data analysis with real astronomy data
Making Sense of All the Numbers: Data Analysis for Mortals

Bryan Cooley's NCNAAPT presentation, November 2003
"Data Analysis Strategies of Students in a 'Millican' Simulation Experiment"

Tim's NCTM 2003 presentation,
"A Taste of Science:
Introduction to Data Analysis with Fathom"
.
This was never actually presented, so the page has only the abstract.

Notes from Tim's NCTM 2001 presentation,
"Don't Expect the Expected Value"

 

 

These are not from here, of course, but are useful:

apstat (Advanced Placement statistics) archives | sign up

Fathom listserv

PhysLrnr (physics education research)

 

Here we put links to current versions of software we're using in the Nature of Science project.

php | MySQL

 
 
 

Last updated Auguat 20, 2014