Examples

Listed below are links to examples of activities where students invent and test models that can be used in an introductory statistics class. Each example includes a lesson plan, media article, readiness questions, data sets, and instructions for a group task.

• Measuring Study Effectiveness - Students analyze survey data about study habits and determine a method for rating study effectiveness.
• Judging a Paper Airplane Contest - This activity has students determine how to create a fair judging scheme for a paper airplane contest while considering both the most accurate paper airplane and the best floater.
• Creating a Spam Filter - This activity asks students to work in a team to develop a set of rules that can be used to program a SPAM filter for a client.
• Identifying a Theft Suspect - This activity challenges students to develop a model for predicting the characteristics of a person who has committed a crime.
• Judging Airlines - Students examine data on departure delays for five airlines flying out of the Chicago O'Hare airport and develop a model to determine which airline has the best chance of departing on time.
• Judging Randomness - Students create rules to allow them to judge whether or not the shuffle feature on a particular iPod appears to produce randomly generated playlists.

Further example MEAs can be found online

• https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/Research/SGMM/Problems/MEAs_html - Website with many MEAs created for Engineering students.