Teaching probability and statistics in a first-year engineering course

Teaching probability and statistics to undergraduate engineering students is a challenge because of the theoretical nature of the topic. There are many advantages to introducing this topic to first-year students. Students who have seen and worked with topics in probability and statistics are more likely to understand these principles when they are used in later courses, and they more clearly understand the relationship of statistics to their disciplinary coursework. In this paper we describe how probability and statistics can be introduced within a first-semester engineering course. A modular approach was used, which included a lecture with a number of active learning exercises, a homework assignment, and a hands-on experiment to help them better understand the theoretical background. Assessment results illustrate that after the module, the students believed they could meet all of the modulepsilas learning objectives and that each of the learning opportunities contributed to their achievement of the objectives.