My son is a senior in high school this year and is taking AP Statistics. My daughter also took this course when she was in high school.
Overall, it’s a good set of content and being able to understand and reason with statistics is a valuable life skill. An odd thing is that the teacher has assigned problem sets that require using Python. He doesn’t know Python and I don’t know how he would be able to complete the assignments without having someone at home who does.
It’s not complicated programming by any stretch but you need at least a bit of background to get things working. As an example, one of the solutions looks approximately like:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from scipy.stats import norm
#create range of x-values from -4 to 4 in increments of .001
x = np.arange(-4, 4, 0.001)
#create range of y-values that correspond to normal pdf with mean=0 and sd=1
y = norm.pdf(x,0,1)
#define plot
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(9,6))
ax.plot(x,y)
plt.show()
The hardest thing was explaining how to install Python modules with pip and getting it all set up to run on Windows using IDLE. I’m glad to help and gave him a 30 minute tutorial on Python but it feels strange to give that much assistance on a homework assignment. Python is great but it would be much easier for the kids to do a pdf plot online if they don’t know Pyhton.