Using Fortnite to explain percentiles

So, Fortnite is a super popular, first-person-shooter, massive multi-player online game. I only know this because my kid LOVES Fortnite. With the free version, called Battle Royale, a player parachutes onto an island, scour for supplies, and try to kill the other players. Like, there is way more to it than that, but this is my limited, 39-year-old mother of two explanation. And, admittedly, I don't game, so please don't rake me over the coals if I'm not using the proper Fortnite terminology to describe things!

Anyway, my brain thinks in statistics examples. So I noticed that for each Battle Royale match starts with 100 players. See the screen shot: This player is parachuting on to the island at the beginning of the skirmish, and there are still 100 players left since the game is just starting and no one has been eliminated.

Well, when we introduce our students to the normal curve and percentiles and z-scores and such, we tell them that the normal curve represents 100% of the distribution, yeah? Well, think of all the players that begin the skirmish as the total normal distribution for game performance.

And after a player is killed, they find out their rank. See below:

This is a screen shot of the typical information that comes up when a player is killed. Here, Archieonic placed #90. So, since there are 100 total players, 10 players were eliminated before him/her. SO: This player ranked in the 10th percentile. Get it?

Also, Fortnite provides information that allows you to talk about broader ideas of using percentile ranks, like falling into 10th percentile or the 25th percentile. See below:

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations

Tyler Vigen has has created a long list of easy-to-paste-into-a-powerpoint graphs that illustrate that correlation does not equal causation. For instance, while per capita consumption of cheese and number of people who die by become tangled in their bed sheets may have a strong relationship (r = 0.947091), no one is saying that cheese consumption leads to bed sheet-related death. Although, you could pose The Third Variable question to your students for some of these relationships). Property of Tyler Vigens, http://i.imgur.com/OfQYQW8.png Vigen has also provided a menu of frequently used variables (deaths by tripping, sunlight by state) to help you look for specific examples. This portion is interactive, as you and your students can generate your own graphs. Below, I generated a graph of marriage rates in Pennsylvania and consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Generated at http://www.tylervigen.com/

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