I recently posted the slides from a guest lecture that I gave on
Bayesian methods for biologists/ecologist. In an effort to
promote active learning, the class was not a straight forward
lecture, but rather a combination of informational input from me
and opportunities for students to engage with the concepts via
activities and discussion of demonstrations. These active
components were designed with the goal of promoting students’
construction of knowledge, as opposed to a passive transfer from
teacher to learner. In order to bring the online reader into
closer allignment with the experience of attending the class, I
have decided to provide the additional materials that I used to
promote active learning. 1) Monte-Carlo activity: One student is
the random number generator, the other is the plotter. After
students plot a few points, we collect all the data and walk
through a discussion of why this works. We then scale up and
take a look at the same experiment using a computer simulation
to see how our estimate c