Why learn with numbers and projects?

Statistics is how we learn about many things from a few, and how we check the claims other people make with numbers. You can start learning statistics with us on Learn With Projects.

Why learn with numbers?

Many of the claims you run into come with a number attached: a survey, a chart in a video, a percentage in a headline. If you know how that number was collected and calculated, you can check it yourself instead of taking someone's word for it. So we start with the questions behind the data. Who did we ask, who did we leave out, and what can this sample tell us about everyone else?

You don't need advanced math for this. Our first projects don't require any level of mathematics above 6th grade.

Why learn with projects?

In a project, you start with a question and meet each concept when you need it to go further. In Project 1: Sibling Interviews, you discuss how we can learn about a population using a sample and how our estimates can go wrong. Then you interview 15 to 20 people, turn a paper notebook into your first real dataset, and learn the anatomy of a table with your own rows: observations, variables, values. The project goes for ten lessons, and by the end you have your own research project you can present.

In our experience teaching at the K–12 and undergraduate levels, analyzing a dataset they built themselves and showing charts they made increased students' self-confidence. You will also have a portfolio of real data projects to show for it.

How to get started

Every lesson we publish on YouTube is free. On our practice site, Learn With Projects, each lesson has practice questions with hints and a review schedule. Lesson 1.0 needs no account. For the rest of Project 1, you make a free account (13 or older), which also saves your progress on any device. Younger students join their teacher's or parent's class with a code instead, with no account at all.

Start Lesson 1.0 Make a free account Join a class

When you want to find data of your own, our Free Data Sources Online series shows you where to look, starting with an episode on Kaggle.

How we build LWN lessons

We are not claiming to have invented anything. We just want to share what worked for us and help other teachers and parents. We try to bake in stories, fun facts, and spaced repetition into our projects and lesson plans. We would greatly appreciate any feedback on how we can improve them.

• Projects instead of topics. Concepts arrive as the student is actually ready to learn them and needs them to go further in the project.
• Repetition on purpose. Core concepts come back across lessons and across projects. When a student meets an idea for the third time, in a third context, research suggests it is far more likely to stick (Graham Nuthall, The Hidden Lives of Learners, 2007).
• Authentic data and messy learning. Throughout the curriculum, students either collect their own numbers or rely on real-world datasets. By conducting interviews, running home experiments, and wrestling with the nuances of real information, students get to be active researchers and learn that math is not just sterile textbook scenarios or abstract classroom exercises.
• Focus on concepts over tools. We use free and accessible tools (Sheets, R, Python) used by many people in academia and industry. But, teaching the tool is not the point of our curriculum. Tools come and go, but the concepts students learn will stick with them.
• Independence, not skepticism. The goal is not to produce people who distrust numbers. It is to produce people who can check them, make honest ones of their own, and participate in the conversation.