Statistical Methods for Engineers

I use fill in the blank lecture notes for this course. I have based my notes off of Jimmy Doi’s notes, which he kindly shared with me, so I don’t have the notes posted publically. I have updated with some of my own examples and have focused on using JMP as the statistical software, but feel it is still similar enough to warrant keeping private. But please reach out if you are curious!

Here are some selected activities I have developed for the course:

• Edward Tufte’s The Decision to Launch the Space Shuttle Challenger

  • Students read (or listen to a recording of me reading the article) as part of their homework

  • We have an in class discussion involving

    • When data should be made public

    • interpreting some of Tufte’s more loquacious but dense prose

    • mention of “high” and “low” probabilities with no documentation

• Making Dice! I brought polymer clay to class and had students make six-sided dice. I told them we would have a competition to see who had the fairest die and who had the least fair.

  • Assignment (week 4/5): Rolling your die and simulating rolling a fair die

    • students generate their own data as well as simulating in JMP assuming a fair die. They use exploratory data analysis techniques (visualization, summary statistics) to compare the two data sets and comment on whether they believe the die is fair based on their output.

  • Assignment (week 9/10): Testing whether the die is fair

    • students will use their generated data to perform a Chi-square test. Some students with unfair dice may have to collect additional data to make the lower bound on the cell counts!