Project MOSAIC

Project MOSAIC is a community of educators working to develop a new way to introduce mathematics, statistics, computation and modeling to students in colleges and universities.

From 2009 to 2016, Project MOSAIC was supported by a grant from the US National Science Foundation (NSF DUE-0920350). The core resources developed during that time continue to be maintained and expanded. New MOSAIC resources such as a calculus textbook and the Little Apps are being added and improved in the 2020s.

MOSAIC resources

NEW! An advanced draft is now available of the new Lessons in Statistical Thinking introductory text and the associated {LSTbook} R package. This is a complete rethinking of introductory statistics that places it in the context of data science, modeling, and causal inference.

The {mosaic} package for R which supports teaching stats using a expressive, compact, and consistent formula syntax. This minimizes start up costs for students and enables students to calculate descriptive statistics, create statistical graphics, and construct statistical graphics. {mosaic} is one of three main syntaxes for teaching and doing statistics using R. (For a comparison, see Prof. Amelia McNamara’s video presentation.)

Hundreds of instructors have found {mosaic} helpful in teaching introductory statistics. Example:

Stats <- df_stats(births ~ wday, data = Births2015, 
                    center = mean, conf = ci.mean(0.95))
  Stats

  response wday    center conf_lower conf_upper
1   births  Sun  7397.808   7319.233   7476.383
2   births  Mon 11739.385  11490.746  11988.023
3   births  Tue 12585.808  12461.750  12709.866
4   births  Wed 12279.096  12140.249  12417.944
5   births  Thu 12083.434  11775.866  12391.001
6   births  Fri 11834.558  11550.568  12118.547
7   births  Sat  8357.096   8250.949   8463.243

The {ggformula} package, which enables ggplot2 graphics to be generated using the formula syntax. Example:

gf_jitter(births ~ wday, data = Births2015, alpha = 0.5) %>%
    gf_errorbar(conf_lower + conf_upper ~ wday, data = Stats, 
                color = ~ wday, inherit=FALSE)

The LittleApps developed with the MAA StatPREP project. These are data- and graphics-centric tools for teaching introductory statistics without coding. See the LittleApps site for more information.
A complete MOSAIC Calculus course including an online, freely accessible textbook, exercises, and symbolic software in R, all following the Project MOSAIC philosophy of building courses around modeling, using data, and integrating computing directly into the subject matter.
Online, freely accessible texts for teaching statistics that are coordinated with the {mosaic} R package.
- Statistical Modeling: A Fresh Approach by Daniel Kaplan
- End-of-chapter exercises for Statistical Modeling. Answers are available to instructors upon request.
- Statistical Modeling: Computational Technique by Daniel Kaplan and Frank Shaw. This booklet introduces the R language commands for the methods introduced in A Fresh Approach.
- A Student’s Guide to R