Engaging Students in a Large Lecture: An Experiment Using Sudoku Puzzles

Abstract

In this paper, we describe an in-class experiment that is easy to implement with large groups of students. The experiment takes approximately 15-20 minutes to run and involves each student completing one of four types of Sudoku puzzles and recording the time it takes to completion. The resulting data set can be used as a teaching tool at an introductory level right through to an advanced level of statistics. Basic methods for describing and displaying data as well as the intricacies that arise with real data may be discussed in an introductory course. The range of more sophisticated analyses that can be taught with the data set include chi-squared tests for independence, ANOVA, t-and F-tests, logistic regression and survival analysis. We describe and provide the tools to implement the experiment and illustrate several potential teaching topics using a collected data set.

Investigating students’ use of official statistical data

“…Teachers' professional development underlines the need of collaboration between statisticians and mathematics educators to prepare teachers to teach statistics (Batanero and Diaz, 2010). Brophy and Hahn (2014) highlighted the importance of using real data in teaching statistics through in-class experiments with large groups of students. The resulting data set served as a teaching tool to illustrate various potential topics.…”

Teaching Statistics from the Operating Table: Minimally Invasive and Maximally Educational

“…Encouragement for incorporating the scientific process of interdisciplinary data analysis as statistics is actually practiced is growing (Cummiskey, Kuiper, and Sturdivant 2012). Developers of other such in-class experiments note that such activities allow the opportunity for students to see for themselves some of the practical issues that can arise when carrying out research studies (Brophy and Hahn 2014). As such, students are better prepared to tackle real research questions outside of the statistics classroom.…”

Systematic Human Learning and Generalization From a Brief Tutorial With Explanatory Feedback

“…Sudoku is appealing as a domain in which to explore the general features of human systematic reasoning ability, since a solution technique, such as the hidden single technique as presented in our experiment, can be described in simple language without the need to appeal to technical concepts, making it potentially accessible to a wide range of human participants. Indeed, although Sudoku superficially uses numbers, it involves no numerical or arithmetic reasoning, and swapping numbers for English letters, Greek letters, or even symbols does not have any significant effect on correctness (Brophy & Hahn, 2014 ).…”