Best Cooperative Project Award 2017

Peter Howley, The National Schools’ Poster Competition coordinator (Statistical Society of Australia, University of Newcastle)

Announcement of Winner

Four projects were considered for the 2017 competition. The winner is:

• The National Schools' Poster Competition - Australia

This national initiative in Australia has involved collaboration between University academics, national societies (Statistical Society of Australia and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)), industry professionals, schools, media experts and sponsors (SAS, Teacher’s Mutual Bank, RDA Hunters’ ME Program), with additional support from the Australian Government’s Department of Education and Training.

Competition details

The Best Cooperative Project Award in Statistical Literacy is awarded every two years, in recognition of outstanding, innovative, and influential statistical literacy projects that affect a broad segment of the general public and are fruit of the cooperation of different types of institutions (national statistical offices, schools, statistical societies, media, libraries etc.).

Submitted projects should have at least some of the following characteristics:

• Be current and have the potential to remain so in the future.
• Have free access to the project resources and membership.
• Educate on concepts of statistical theory and data analysis, their use in the development of information about countries and societies, and their application in a broad spectrum of disciplines and areas of society.
• Have pedagogically sound contents suitable for a general audience.
• Involve two or more institutions that would not usually work closely together. Examples are projects that involve cooperation between:
• A national statistical institute, a statistical society and a knowledge centre, such as the winners of the 2015 competition with the product 'Exploristica', which was the result of cooperation between Sociedade Portuguesa de Estatística (SPE), Instituto Nacional de Estatistica (INE), and Ciência Viva in Portugal.
• Or between a national statistical institute, a statistical society, such as the winners of the 2013 competition with the 'CensusAtSchools', which was the result of cooperation between the Royal Statistical Society and the Office of National Statistics) in the United Kingdom.
• Other examples could be cooperation among universities and schools, or schools and statistical societies or media experts, statistical societies, national statistical offices, schools or combinations thereof.
• Be attractive to a wide audience, have “fun” appeal, invite participation. Characteristics that make it such are: Easy to find material, dynamism, variety, sound pedagogy, updated and contemporary subject matter.
• Have archives that are widely available. For example, if there is a regularly run contest, then past winners should be known.
• Have international outreach and make creative use of available resources. For example, a web page in English would help the dissemination of the resources to many countries.

There is no fixed format for applications, but entries should have sufficient information to allow the judging panel to assess the quality of the entry against the criteria outlined above.

Timetable: Proposals should be sent to the ISLP Deputy Director, Steve MacFeely by the end of April 2017.

Prizes: The winning project will receive 1000 euros.

Judging panel (2017):

• Chair: Steve MacFeely (Ireland)
• Maria Manuel Nascimento (Portugal)
• Peter Howley (Australia)
• Hugo Hernández (Mexico)