The company VSN in the United Kingdom has offered to develop a free-to-use menu driven schools version of their latest software. This will include all of the graphics of their full version plus appropriate options for the remaining sections of the school statistics syllabus. David Baird, in conjunction with VSN, is developing the options in the new menu for use in New Zealand high schools. Currently mainly Excel is being used in schools for statistics at the higher level.

A meeting was arranged by John Harraway in Wellington in early February at Statistics New Zealand where the new package was shown to Ian Stevens and Angela Jones from the Ministry of Education, Roger Harvey from Victoria University, and others including Alex Neill and Mike Camden. The presentation was well received and it was decided to move to the next step of developing the new program by enlisting the help of mathematics school teachers in Dunedin and the Otago Mathematics Association to get their feedback and to trial the new system in some local schools.

A meeting with 12 teachers was held in Dunedin on 9 March. David presented the teachers and several other interested people with copies of two lessons which he had developed for use in the classroom. Feedback was positive and the program is currently being used locally.

A capable statistics honours student at Otago, Ross Haines, has been employed to develop further lessons to accompany the statistics education videos which John Harraway has developed over the last two years. These lessons will be developed with the help of teachers. It is hoped that in about two months there will be a set of 12 lessons, with more to come, showing the use of GenStat schools version on the video data. But this is only one source of data. Any data files can be loaded into GenStat which means that CensusAtSchool files could be analysed, Statistics New Zealand SURFs, and one’s own data. Data files can also be uploaded easily from Excel or from R.

It will be easy to install the software in any school that chooses to use it. Multiple copies can be used in the classroom and all students will be able to take the software home for home use. There is no limit on the number of cases or the number of variables. The graphics are excellent with many options available once a student has worked through the lessons which are being developed. One local school mathematics head of department believes the program has use down to at least year 9 in our schools.

The Campbell Fund has supported this teaching initiative by making a grant to John Harraway to cover some of the initial travel costs to the meetings but more importantly to assist with payment to Ross Haines for his development work.

Mike Camden

Link to the GenStat statistical software homepage http://www.vsni.co.uk/software/genstat/