A Case Study of an Activity Based Mathematical Education: A Kernel Density Estimation to Solve a Dilemma for a Missile Simulation

While the statistical concept 'order statistics' has a great number of applications in our society ranging from industry to military analysis, it is not necessarily an easy concept to understand for many people. Adding some interesting simulation activities of this concept to the probability or statistics curriculum, however, can enhance the learning curve greatly. A hands-on and a graphic calculator based activities of a missile simulation were introduced by Kim(2003) in the context of order statistics. This article revisits the two activities in his paper and point out a dilemma that occurs from the violation of an assumption on two deviation parameters associated with the missile simulation. A third activity is introduced to resolve the dilemma in the terms of a kernel density estimation which is a nonparametric approach.