Barbie doll bungee jumping makes statistics class fun

Thank goodness my college curriculum never required me to take a class as intimidating-sounding as "MA310 Essential Statistics."

Then again, if the class was half as much fun as AIB Assistant Professor Angie Hanson’s class is, I might be quick to enroll.

“Essential Statistics” is one of AIB’s required Core General Education classes. That means – according to the AIB course catalog – it’s a class designed to help establish a “foundation of knowledge” and “an ability to communicate, evaluate, think, solve and make decisions critically and creatively.”

That makes good sense.        

But the class is further described as “an introduction to the field of statistics, including types of data, how data is gathered, descriptive statistics, probability theory, types of distributions, and statistical inference (e.g., building confidence intervals and testing hypotheses).”

That’s scary – unless the instructor is Assistant Professor Hanson, with her wonderfully refreshing approach to learning.  

“If students think math is fun – and they understand it, too – then I think I’ve done my job,” Hanson says. “I think math is a blast, but most people don’t think that immediately.”

To win over the math-reluctant, math-intimidated or math-challenged students, Hanson incorporates creative hands-on activities – such as a recent Barbie doll bungee-jump experiment.

“We’re learning about linear regression and correlation and how two variables are related,” Hanson says. “So as an activity, the students did some data collection with Barbies by having their dolls fall while attached to one rubber band, two, three, four and five.

“Then they used that data to make a graph and write an equation to predict how many rubber bands would be needed for the doll to fall different distances.”

During one class period, several Barbie dolls – and one Ken doll – made bungee jumps off the second-floor railing above the lobby of AIB's Activities Center. 

“We actually tested the students’ predictions so they can see that a prediction can be very close or very far off – and see how linear regression really works, rather than doing it in theory," Hanson says.

Some Barbies wore chic work-out clothes, while some wore cumbersome full-skirted evening gowns. (I’m not sure how the attire factored into the experiment, but the fashion faux pas was glaring.)

Anyway, the groups’ calculations brought one Barbie safely within 3 feet of the hard tiled floor below; another came within 3 inches. Poor Ken was an unfortunate casualty of the experiment.

“One group wasn’t very consistent in how they collected data, and that’s the one who died,” Hanson explains. “If you don’t collect your data consistently, you’re not going to get a good result.”

The lesson here – besides having a good attorney standing by if you’ve miscalculated the necessary number of rubber bands needed to protect your jumper – is that such predictions are not perfect, Hanson says.

“No matter what, we’re going to have error,” she says. “That amount of error is called the residual. In real life, you take the actual distance falling minus the prediction to get what’s left over, or error. In a physical limitation, we can have some error; we just have to make sure we err on the safe side.”

I never dreamed a statistics class could be this much fun.

To watch a video of Angie Hanson’s class doing Barbie doll bungee-jumping experiments, click on this link.