Page 139 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 1

IPS115 Reija H.
Fig. 2. An example of a statistical poster, which was awarded second place in
the upper comprehensive school division of the 2016-2017 Poster
Competition. Authors: Adiya Sadanova, Marina Tarassova and Botagoz
Dauletbek, Kazakstan, (Source: ISLP Website, [2019]).

One way to spark the youth’s interest in statistics for the first time is
gamification. The Digicom-project by Eurostat has produced many excellent
mobile- and computer-based games which pave the way to interest, and even
addiction, to statistics (f. ex. Luhmann, S. et al. [2018]). ISLP awards The Best
Cooperative Project every second year to promote great collaboration
customs in the field of statistics worldwide. In the year 2015, the award was
given to Exploristica – Adventures in Statistics by Statistics Portugal. It is a
great example of how familiarisation with statistical thinking can happen
through an adventure game. The game is geared towards 12-17-year olds and
goes through the five important phases of the statistical process - select,
collect, describe, estimate and interpret. The game consists of six parts, such
as the Submarine game (players pilot a submarine through an underwater
ecosystem and collect specimens of new species of reptiles for analysis), Quiz
(teams compete in a rapid fire quiz to answer questions from Census 2011, in
a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” type setting) and the Giant Ape game
(players help “Conga” the gorilla conduct a sample survey of voters in a small
town). The game is a physical whole. (Campos, P. & Ribeiro, J. [2018].) There
are also plans underway to make it into a mobile version.

Fig.3. Submarine game in Exploristica (source: Campos, P. & Ribeiro, J. [2018])

5. Discussion and Conclusion
Media literacy, statistical literacy and data literacy are increasingly
important civic skills that affect all the operators of society in one way or
another. ISLP, from its own part, promotes these aims globally through its
collaboration network. The more comprehensive the ISLP network becomes,
the more weight it has. In addition to statisticians and statistics professionals,
it is even more important to network and build an ecosystem of statistical

128 | I S I W S C 2 0 1 9