Interactive Demonstrations for Statistics Education on the World Wide Web

R. Webster West and R. Todd Ogden
University of South Carolina

Journal of Statistics Education v.6, n.3 (1998)

Copyright (c) 1998 by R. Webster West and R. Todd Ogden, all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editor.

Histogram Applet

This applet is designed to teach students how bin widths (or the number of bins) affect a histogram. The histogram below is for the Old Faithful data set. The observations are the time (in seconds) between eruptions for the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park. Students should interactively change the bin width by dragging the arrow underneath the bin width scale. For large bin widths, the bimodal nature of the dataset is hidden, and for small bin widths the plot reduces to a spike at each data point. What bin width do you think provides the best picture of the underlying data?

Return to West and Ogden Paper | Return to Table of Contents | Return to the JSE Home Page