A key motivational tactic in undergraduate mathematics teaching is to launch topics with fundamental questions that originate from surprising or remarkable phenomena. Nonetheless, constructing a sequence of tasks that promotes students' own routes to resolving such questions is challenging. This note aims to address this challenge in two ways.…

A primary goal of introductory statistics courses is to develop a student's ability to think statistically. To motivate students to this end, the literature suggests that statistics courses use exercises that are relevant and familiar to students. Work in educational psychology highlights the importance of connecting new concepts to pre-existing…