By Dr Laura Bonnett

It may only be early in the new decade, but I have already had two pieces of excellent news relating to teaching statistics. On 6^th January, I was announced as the Royal Statistical Society’s (RSS) William Guy Lecturer for 2020. This means that I will be delivering lectures to school students across the UK on the topic of ‘Driving is a risky business!’ Whether we drive or cycle, catch the bus or walk, we are all affected by driving, and the policies surrounding it. How do we therefore decide whether people with long-term medical conditions should be offered driving licences? My lecture will attempt to answer this question for people who have had epileptic seizures.

I will begin by encouraging the audience to deliberate an acceptable level of risk of an accident in the first year after passing a driving test. I will then prompt debate as to whether this level of risk should also apply to people with underlying medical conditions such as epilepsy. Next, I will outline (in an accessible way) the statistical modelling required to calculate the risk of the event, and how these risks can be based on clinical characteristics. Ultimately, I will demonstrate how the risk estimates can be used to provide estimations of time off driving. I will also outline the required decision-making process that the Driving and Vehicle Licensing Agency must undertake, and highlight the challenges that regulators, clinicians, people with epilepsy, and the general public face as a result of the decisions made.

I was lucky enough to have a ‘trial run’ of the lecture as the Rosalind Franklin Award Lecturer for the 2018 British Science Festival in Hull. Both my props and I have been really looking forward to the opportunity of visiting schools and universities around the country to talk about an important policy, which is now informed by evidence, not just expert opinion, but understandably during the current health crisis all plans are on hold. I hope to be able to provide an update soon as to when and how schools can participate when we have more information available.

The William Guy Lecture is closely aligned to my day job as a medical statistician at the University of Liverpool. My research there focuses on developing and validating risk prediction models for people with chronic conditions, such as asthma and epilepsy. However, I also enjoy the opportunity to “do something different”. Dr Simon White from the Cambridge’s Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit and I share a similar interest – we both want to engage the next generation to think positively about statistics, and numbers. Therefore, we have developed a suite of hands-on statistics activities that demonstrate a statistical concept via a fun game and/or imaginative props including soft toy penguins, 200 rubber ducks and A3 playing cards! The eight activities that we have developed to date are described at www.rss.org.uk/hands-on. Simon and I have also written up some of the activities for publication in Teaching Statistics.

On 27^th January, our article entitled “Investigating populations via penguins and their poo!” was announced as the winner of the Peter Holmes prize for 2019. The judges enjoyed our practical and fun classroom activity, and felt it was adaptable across a wide range of educational levels and feasibilities. The activity calculates how many penguins are in a single colony within Antarctica based on a photograph of their poo, taken from space, and a set of soft toy (zoo) penguins. We always enjoy running this activity as it instantly engages young people, is hands‐on, fun and adaptable to learning situations ranging across science fairs, primary and secondary schooling, and the general public. Students seem to enjoy it too as they get to use the word “poo” legitimately, and to handle our waddle of soft toy props!

The rest of 2020 probably won’t be quite so award-laden, and is certainly going to be very different to what I imagined. I was looking forward to visiting Cheltenham, Derby, Bolton and my home city of Liverpool to name but a few, to spread the joy of statistics to the next generation of number lovers! Sadly that is not looking likely at this moment, but my colleagues in the Teaching Statistics SIG and I are exploring ways in which we can continue to support statistics education in light of the strange times we are living through.