Teaching Statistics with World of Warcraft
15th February 2009
David Friedman is always worth reading.
In an earlier post I proposed an economics course built around World of Warcraft. I have much less experience teaching statistics than teaching economics and I suspect the game is less suited for the former than the latter purpose. But it does occur to me that it provides quite a lot of opportunities for observing data and trying to infer patterns from it and so could be used to both explain and apply statistical inference. And I suspect that, as in the case of economics, application to a world with which the student was familiar and involved and to problems of actual interest to him would have a significant positive effect on attention and understanding.