Starting a project

Writing for the CPM AP Statistics text started with a week at a Homewood Suites in Minneapolis right across the street from the Mall of America. I didn’t get out much, other than when I got to eat dinner with @VeganMathBeagle and @trianglemancsd on my first night and one night out with the whole writing group. Instead, I went to a Super-Target the second day to buy food to eat and spent essentially the whole week in the hotel.

Our working group for the Stats text was only four writers (we’ve added a couple since then). There’s something nice about that size; it’s hard to complete an entire text (well, a semester’s worth; first semester print deadline was last week for the pilot) in a summer with such a small group, but it’s a small enough group that we can come to consensus easily and really see each others’ point of view. We spent the first day deciding on sequencing, then dove into creativity, mostly focusing on the second semester material. We had a head-start on the first semester: CPM already has many descriptive statistics lessons available because of Common Core alignment! In fact, you can see all of those lessons right now on their website: http://cpm.org/statistics-supplement . They were a great starting place, so for that week we worked on rough-drafting new material. Fun! Inference is amazing to sequence and write if you do it all at once, so smooth and flowy. I also started experimenting with the Shiny tools for web-based eTools that week, which I will discuss more in a later post. By the end, we had a framework for inference pretty much written.

After that, we went our separate ways. I had a couple of weeks where I couldn’t get much done (vacation and prior commitments) before I dove into Chapter 2 – Bivariate Quantitative Data (a.k.a. scatterplots, LSRL, correlation, etc.). And even though there was already a lot written for that topic, there was plenty to keep me engaged.

But more on that tomorrow. This #MTBOSBlaugest post managed to wait until my bedtime, so I promised my wife I’d keep it short. Catch you tomorrow, blogosphere.