It is essential that a university provide an exceptional learning experience in their introductory Statistics course that is approachable by students of any major. At the University of Tennessee, we have been improving our Statistical Reasoning course by having students collect and analyze their own data from a variety of ”Portable Populations”. These populations include Scrabble tiles, Uno cards, standard dice, and dice from the craps table of the Stratosphere Casino, and provide a variety of active learning experiences working with quantitative and categorical data. Knowing the make-up of the population allows students to make connections between their individual sample statistics and the population parameters that are sometimes difficult to grasp from computer-generated data. As a result, students gain a deeper understanding of the Central Limit Theorem and Hypothesis Testing.
