Elements Of An Activity Based Statistics Course For Engineers

Common criticisms of undergraduate engineering statistics courses are that they are too academic in focus, excessively theoretical, and divorced from real problems that appear in industry. This paper describes our effort to make statistics “come alive” through an activitybased engineering statistics course at Western Michigan University. This three-semester hour course is structured to include laboratory sessions, workshop sessions, and problem-based lecture sessions. The laboratory activities are intended to provide the student with an opportunity to become proficient in designing basic experiments, collecting data, and analyzing problems using PC-based statistical software. The workshop sessions involve short lecture segments mixed with team-based problem-solving activities and software tutorials. With the exception of lecture periods, course sessions do not take place in a classroom, but rather are held in a computerteaching laboratory or in one of the laboratories managed by the Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering Department. In this paper we discuss our experiences following two offerings of this course to students in industrial, chemical, construction, civil, manufacturing, and paper engineering programs. In particular, we focus on the laboratory and workshop activities. In developing this new course structure two challenging objectives were set: (i) to provide undergraduate students with a positive introduction to engineering statistics; and (ii) to give students hands-on experience with experimental design, data collection and analysis through laboratories and workshops. A comparison is made to our former traditional lecture course.