Adam Childers and Dave Taylor received a national award at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Denver on January 17, 2020. They were honored with the Outstanding Contributed Paper in Statistics Education award for 2019. In their award-winning talk, Adam and Dave presented their Classroom Stats app and several of its potential uses in a statistics classroom. They wrote the app to accept input from students’ phones and display statistical analyses of the students’ responses. The analysis is more compelling to the students due to its personal and immediate origin.
This is the second time in four years that Adam has won this award – this is the sign of a true dynasty. The JMM is annually the largest mathematics conference in the world, so the award is a significant achievement. Adam’s leadership and innovation have enhanced a traditional strength of Roanoke College: its statistics program. The tradition includes longtime department chair Ron Walpole, whose introductory statistics textbook was a worldwide bestseller.
At a time when statistical literacy is a necessary component of informed citizenship, Roanoke College’s innovative INQ 240: Statistical Reasoning courses give our students a competitive edge in the world. Add in a strong Statistics concentration, a new Data Science major, a Sports Analytics concentration, and an Actuarial Science major and you have, statistically speaking, a significant range of attractive options at Roanoke College.
