The People Have Spoken

…and they approve of poker in the classroom!

(Did you think this was going to be another political post?? :D)

About a week ago, I asked my class for midway feedback regarding how they think the course is going. I am specifically interested in how they feel about the poker aspects of the course, but I also had some general questions as well. The result above was the final question on the survey, which is a pretty good overall summary.

But here are the rest of the results, with a total of n=16.

Question 1: How would you describe whether class time is used effectively or not?

Question 2: How would you rate whether assignments and projects are designed to support the course's learning goals?

Question 3: Overall, how would you describe whether you think the use of poker has been beneficial to your learning of the material?

Question 4: Overall, on a scale of 0 to 5, how much do you enjoy our usage of poker examples in the classroom as compared to any other types of examples that could be used? (0=no enjoyment, 5=most enjoyment)

Question 5: Overall, on a scale of 0 to 5, how much interest in poker did you have at the beginning of the course? (with 0=no interest, 5=most interest)

Question 6: Overall, on a scale of 0 to 5, how much interest do you currently have in poker? (again with 0=no interest, 5=most interest)

For these last two questions, I can take the difference at the student level, to look at the distribution of that difference. Here it is:

So, no one's interest in poker has gone down since the start of the semester, which is not much of a surprise (but is nice to know). Also, of the three students who had a 0 difference, their interest at the beginning of the course was already at a 5, and remained at 5.

One student even went from a 0 to a 5! The data are anonymous, but I wish I knew who that was!

Overall, my takeaway is that my students are generally happy about using poker as a pedagogical platform for this course, and feel that it is at least somewhat beneficial to their learning of the material. So that's great news! I can continue as planned, and will likely use this book again the next time that I get to teach this course. Woohoo!

Side note: this is the first blog post that I have created using RMarkdown! I had to do some css stuff on the blogger side to make it work, but I think it all worked out in the end. And since I'm on blogger, it's not quite as seamless as using blogdown, but it's still pretty nice.

Next up: We did a fun activity with continuous uniform random variables that I teased here, and I think it went pretty well. We're still working our way through the theoretical aspects of it but I'll write about that in the next post.