Making Learning Fun!

[vhawk01]

So, I have to give a small, 5 minute or so, presentation to a small group of my peers and an epidemiologist. He is...eccentric...and so has requested that, rather than lecturing on our selected topic, we come up with some sort of fun, engaging presentation. The class is Evidenced-based Medicine, which is sort of an intro to biostatistics and study design. My topic is Correlation.

I don't need any help explaining correlation to them. My classmates are mostly stats-challenged, and this is a fairly basic course. However, I'm not very creative, in general, and I have a hard time with projects like this. I'm wondering if anyone has some suggestions. I figured this is at least tangential to the forum, and I know some of you are professors and teachers, and most of you are or were students. These are all grad students, and most of them have little stats knowledge. Can anyone think of any fun way of presenting the concept of Correlation? We're allowed to do basically anything, with no specific requirements. We were instructed to make it a "Explaining it to your parents who don't know anything" level of complexity.

Appreciate any help you guys have.

[Duke]

Boil down what you want to say about correlation to one major theme, show a picture to demonstrate it, and invent some sort of activity that will make it clear.

For instance, if you want to stress that correlation does not imply a causal relationship, well, maybe track sizes of people, and also whether or not they pee standing up. They should come up with bigger people peeing standing up more of the time, so there would be some correlation. Then you point out that the actual cause is the sex of the individual, and not their size. It's not perfect, but it should get the idea across.

5 minutes is basically "no time at all" to teach something.

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
Boil down what you want to say about correlation to one major theme, show a picture to demonstrate it, and invent some sort of activity that will make it clear.

For instance, if you want to stress that correlation does not imply a causal relationship, well, maybe track sizes of people, and also whether or not they pee standing up. They should come up with bigger people peeing standing up more of the time, so there would be some correlation. Then you point out that the actual cause is the sex of the individual, and not their size. It's not perfect, but it should get the idea across.

5 minutes is basically "no time at all" to teach something.

[/ QUOTE ]

Right, I'm not really teaching it so much as bringing it up and highlighting it. There are 12 of us, each with our own topic, and this is all stuff that we are supposed to be familiar with. These are peers.

Thanks for the ideas.

[SoReady]

Bring it up and highlight it, hmmm.

"Correlations are essentially relationships.

It's been shown that CEO's, for whatever reason, tend to be tall. The average CEO in the USA is over 6 feet tall, IIRC.
In fact, there's a significant relationship between height and salary in the USA today. Tall people tend to make more money than shorter people.

There's a positive correlation between income and height.

Having picked up on this tendancy, this weird occurance, we can now guess - "why do tall people make more money?"
You know, you need to observe something before you can guess how it works. Correlations are a simple observation.

In this example, I think it was shown that humans naturally are attracted to, on some degree, tall people. Tall people garner a certain natural respect from others. That helps the giants progress faster in the business world than your average shorty, hence the higher salary."

I'd do something succinct and basic like that. *shrug*

Does it need to be an any-more-detailed definition than that?

[dknightx]

[ QUOTE ]
Bring it up and highlight it, hmmm.

"Correlations are essentially relationships.

It's been shown that CEO's, for whatever reason, tend to be tall. The average CEO in the USA is over 6 feet tall, IIRC.
In fact, there's a significant relationship between height and salary in the USA today. Tall people tend to make more money than shorter people.

There's a positive correlation between income and height.

Having picked up on this tendancy, this weird occurance, we can now guess - "why do tall people make more money?"
You know, you need to observe something before you can guess how it works. Correlations are a simple observation.

In this example, I think it was shown that humans naturally are attracted to, on some degree, tall people. Tall people garner a certain natural respect from others. That helps the giants progress faster in the business world than your average shorty, hence the higher salary."

I'd do something succinct and basic like that. *shrug*

Does it need to be an any-more-detailed definition than that?

[/ QUOTE ]

zzzzzzz

[dknightx]

what you should try to do is poke fun at how people can often times confuse correlation with causation. i'm sure you can think of some funny examples, and possible demostrate it yourself (maybe go around campus asking random people questions, and tape it).

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
Bring it up and highlight it, hmmm.

"Correlations are essentially relationships.

It's been shown that CEO's, for whatever reason, tend to be tall. The average CEO in the USA is over 6 feet tall, IIRC.
In fact, there's a significant relationship between height and salary in the USA today. Tall people tend to make more money than shorter people.

There's a positive correlation between income and height.

Having picked up on this tendancy, this weird occurance, we can now guess - "why do tall people make more money?"
You know, you need to observe something before you can guess how it works. Correlations are a simple observation.

In this example, I think it was shown that humans naturally are attracted to, on some degree, tall people. Tall people garner a certain natural respect from others. That helps the giants progress faster in the business world than your average shorty, hence the higher salary."

I'd do something succinct and basic like that. *shrug*

Does it need to be an any-more-detailed definition than that?

[/ QUOTE ]

Appreciate all the posts, everyone.

Not sure if this is a troll account or not, though. Awesome either way.