The Chi-Squared chapter in AP Statistics provides a welcome diversion from the means and proportions tests which dominate hypothesis test conversations. After a few tweets last week about a clay die activity I use, there were many requests for this post – and I don’t like to disappoint my stats friends! I first heard of this activity from Beth Benzing, who is part of our local PASTA (Philly Area Stats Teachers) group, and who shares her many professional development sessions on her school website. I’ve added a few wrinkles, but the concept is all Beth’s.
ACTIVITY SUMMARY: students make their own clay dice, then roll their dice to assess the “fairness” of the die. The chi-squared statistic is introduced and used to assess fairness.
You’ll need to go out to your local arts and crafts store and buy a tub of air-dry clay. The day before this activity, my students took their two-sample hypothesis tests. As they completed the test, I gave each a hunk of clay and instructions to make a die – reminding them that opposite sides of a die sum to 7. Completed dice are placed on index cards with the students names and left to dry. Overnight is sufficient drying time for nice, solid dice, and the die farm was shared in a tweet, which led to some stats jealousy:
The next day, students were handed this Clay Dice worksheet to record data in our die rolling experiment.
In part 1, students rolled their die 60 times (ideal for computing expected counts), recorded their rolls and computed the chi-squared statistic by hand / formula. This was our first experience with this new statistic, and it was easy to see how larger deviations from the expected cause this statistic to grow, and also the property that chi-squared must always be postivie (or, in rare instances, zero).
Students then contributed their chi-squared statistic to a class graph. I keep bingo daubers around my classroom to make these quick graphs. After all students shared their point, I asked students to think about how much evidence would cause one to think a die was NOT fair – just how big does that chi-squared number need to be? I was thrilled that students volunteered numbers like 11,12,13….they have generated a “feel” for significance. With 5 degrees of freedom, the critical value is 11.07, which I did not share on the graph here until afterwards.
In part 2, I wanted students to experience the same statistic through a truly “random” die. Using the RandInt feature on our calculators, students generated 60 random rolls, computed the chi-squared statistic, and shared their findings on a new dotplot. The results were striking:
In stats, variability is everywhere, and activities don’t often provide the results we hope will occur. This is one of those rare occasions where things fell nicely into place. None of the RandInt dice exceeded the critical value, and we had a number of clay dice which clearly need to go back to the die factory.