iNZight for Beginners

iNZight Insights in the beginning… Whangarei PD Day May 6th 2013

Jim Hogan

My Goals Today  Have you gain confidence to explore this software  Make you aware of where to find resources

 Help you appreciate when to use iNZight  Become an iNZight user

 Have fun being a learner again.

What are your goals?

Plan of Nec Slides  Downloading and installing on Mac or PC  Basic history, ownership and use  Starting it up  Data and variables  Graphs (dots, bars and boxes)  PPDAC and Inference  Discussion of when to use (and when not to use)

 PPDAC and “on the second day…”

Downloading and Installing  Download http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~wild/iNZight/, unzip and notice where you put it all.

 To begin find the “START_INZIGHT.command”

 Double click the ICON and way we go

 Investigate this website!

iNZight History…  iNZight has been primarily supported by The University of Auckland, Department of Statistics

 with additional support from Statistics New Zealand and the NZ Ministry of Education via Census at School NZwebsite  Useless info…it is written in R, which is a subset of S a global used computer language for statistics. oh…

…designed for our schools  Initially designed for New Zealand high schools, iNZight now extends to multivariable graphics, time series and linear models.

 A simple data analysis system which encourages exploring what data is saying without the distractions of driving complex software

Getting data  I suggest that you import .csv files  After

 “conditioning” the data in Excel  Taking a sample  Getting rid of nonsense  Tidying and ordering  And so on.

 Develop a system that works for you… .csv

Making a .csv file  In Excel select the file type you want.

Data and Variables  Categorical data are things like words. One does not add words. Telephone numbers are categorical data. The sum of two telephone numbers does not mean a lot.

 Numerical data can be added and multiplied. Numerical data can be converted to categorical data. Why might we do this?

Dot Plots and Boxes  Rather easy to make  Drag some numerical data into the variable.

Bar graph  Drag some categorical data into the variable

PPDAC  Ask a sensible question

 “I wonder if the weight of female trout in the Lake Taupo 1993 are heavier than the males?”

 Why would I want to know this? Hmmmm…

ppdAc  We see…

ppdaC  And by any measure, especially the eyes, the answer is …

Conclusion  The female trout in the 1993 Lake Taupo are not heavier than the males.

 The answer is not NO  The answer is not that there is no difference  The answer is not the males are heavier  ATFQ  The answer is as above.

A better question?  I wonder if the trout caught by FF are bigger than the trout caught by any other method.

 Reason…I want to catch a big trout

 Task, you answer this.

When to use iNZight  Discussion time…

When to use iNZight…  My view is  not before students are ready  that means  when they tell you how to  draw a dot plot and bar graph  draw a box and whisker and tell you everything about it  not before and can describe distributions using their eyes.

REASON

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Reason  Reason This is very powerful software and they will take the short cut and use it before understanding what it all means. So if you want to create a rod for your own back then show them how to use it.

 Year 7/8 – never  Year 9/10 – only when they are multiplicative, know fractions and can explain that 25% of the data is in each of box parts. What min, LQ, med, UQ, IQR, max all mean.

 Year 11 – Use deeply.

Use any time as a teaching tool for visual stuff.

Let’s play and discover more questions  Hands on, get dirty!

 Are there two species of dolphins in NZ waters?

 What is your best approach to catching a big trout?

 Time series?