Reflection

The big bold question that I haven’t addressed until now is why did I decide to write and illustrate a children’s book relating to a statistics topic for my writing capstone project. I took the writing capstone course at the very last semester of my undergraduate career here at U of M. Naturally, I wanted to create something that would encapsulate my entire undergraduate experience. I spent a lot of time in the last four years babysitting and tutoring children from ages 1-13. I, also, half by choice and half not by choice, spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I am passionate about. The main takeaways from these last four years boil down to as follows: children are incredible to work with and I love what I decided to major in (statistics). 

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One of my favorite things to do as a babysitter is reading storybooks. Some of the children that I read to were not even old enough to comprehend the words that I was spewing out at them. However, that didn’t take away from how captivated these children were in those storybooks. I also noticed something interesting with children and repetition. They loved reading the same books over and over again. Therefore, just because the children didn’t comprehend the words of a book when they were one year old, doesn’t mean they’ll always be mystified by them.

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The big question of why create a children’s book has been answered. The other big question is why create a children’s book related to statistics? Well, there are a few reasons why I didn’t just create any ordinary children’s book. 1) There is currently only 1 children’s book regarding statistics on the market while there are tons and tons of children’s books regarding biology, physics, etc. Also keep in mind that this book attempts to teach children about bayesian statistics which I actually have read and was left very confused by what I learned from the book. 2) I always get asked what statistics is. I have an incredibly big family and not a single one of my 16 aunts or uncles know what statistics is. So, it can safely be assumed that this book might have more than one intended audience. 

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I’ve always been fascinated by the baby books series by Chris Ferrie where he explains incredibly complex topics. The first one I stumbled upon was quantum physics. I’m speaking for myself when I am saying this. Before I read this book, I had no idea what quantum physics was and I didn’t think I would ever be capable of understanding what it is. I would say that my experience reading this book felt really silly but it was also surprisingly very enlightening. It made me curious about something I once never wanted to learn about. Chris Ferrie did indeed also write the bayesian statistics baby book that I mentioned earlier. I will admit the rest of his baby books were better executed than this particular one.

 

I am incredibly proud of myself for how my first ever children’s book turned out. I would like to acknowledge my (hodgepodge) group members Lidnsey and Evan for being a big help throughout this whole process starting from the brainstorming to the actual execution of this book. The workshops we had during capstone were so so helpful and I’m really glad that I was put into this group despite the fact that our projects did not complement each other in any shape or form. 

This book isn’t meant to be taken as a stand alone book. In a world where I wasn’t taking multiple capstone courses, I would have attempted to create an additional book perhaps on a concept that was a little more complex than min, max and median. In the future, I plan to continue this journey and add on to create a little collection of baby books regarding statistics.