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Graphing Calculators: Discovering the Concepts in Statistics
Denny Burzynski
Instructor, Department of Mathematics
West Valley College
Saratoga, California
denny_burzynski@wvmccd.cc.ca.us
I had just bought a new slide rule - a really nice one - when the first hand-held electronic calculators came out around 1971.... I still have my slide rule but, looking back, I don't understand how people did statistics without calculators - .... it seems silly now to do all that arithmetic by hand.
Statistics actually has concepts that are important to learn - without the sophisticated graphing calculators we use now, students would be sort of lost in the forest among all the trees. They can get bogged down in those computations.... when my students aren't making those arithmetical errors anymore, we can get right from the problem to the interpretation of the results....
I wanted to speed up the process of doing the calculations and to increase the accuracy of the results... and also to allow students to use the built-in functions to compute probabilities and other descriptive statistics functions.
The graphing calculator I require for my classes is the TI 83, from Texas Instruments. The folks at Texas Instruments have programmed in almost all of the statistics formulas that we needÉ. Because I can show them a wider variety of problems, they get a better understanding of the many fields in which statistics can be used, instead of "Okay, we've got time for one problem." Using the graphing calculator takes much of the drudgery out of statistics and brings the subject alive for students....
If you have any questions about the use of graphing calculators, you can contact me at:
denny_burzynski@wvmccd.cc.ca.us
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