I’ve always wanted to do role-playing demonstrations–activities in which different students play different roles in the context of a statistical problem–in my statistics classes, but I’ve rarely gotten them to work.

The only time it was effective was when I was teaching statistical consulting. I got two students to play the role of “consultants” and two students to be the “clients” (with a prepared folder of material from an actual consulting project in an earlier semester), and then when it was done, the other students commented on the performance of the “consultants.” Anyway, I’d like to have role-playing demos for intro statistics classes.

I came across this set of games for teaching history, developed by Mark Carnes of Barnard College.

Deb Nolan had the following reaction:

I finally got a computer that could play the video (I have a new mac.) So I watched the role playing video at Barnard. A long time ago, two of my students did a role playing presentation of their data analysis project. They argued about whether HIV causes AIDS, one was Peter Duesberg. It was quite entertaining. I think it’s a great idea. We could work a few of them in to our demos and projects.

But I’m still not quite sure how to implement it. Perhaps Tian has some ideas?