Seeing Theory: Understanding Basic Statistics

Posted on 12th May 2020 by Laura Kopacheski Stamm

Learning Resources

What is Seeing Theory?

Daniel Kunin created the Seeing Theory while an undergraduate student at Brown University.

The website aims to explain basic knowledge of statistics with visualization tools and interactive functions. Overall, the idea is to help beginners in statistics to understand the concepts turning what seems to be complex into simple explanations.

Who is it aimed at?

Anyone who wants to understand statistics in a more interactive and fun way.

What are you going to learn about?

The resource is divided into 6 chapters by themes. Each one of them is divided into 3 core groups:

My experience with Seeing Theory

It took me about 10 minutes to go through the basic probability session. I had a few problems understanding the written theory, but the interactive examples did help. At the end of each page, there is a ‘download’ option which directs to the Seeing Theory book chapter about the concept. In the book you can find more examples, as well as more basic principles.

As I went further on the other topics, it took me about 10-15 minutes to go through each one. On the whole, I can say it is possible to learn all the resources on the website in slightly more than one hour. If you consider reading the extra explanations, it will take longer.

Conclusion

I enjoyed using the colourful visual resources from the website, it certainly helps to make the concepts clearer. For those who have more difficulty in understanding statistics, they provide better-explained chapters about the concepts in their book. You can also access the complete pdf of the Seeing Theory book on the website for free, which is a nice extra resource.

In short, I would score the website 5 out of 5.