Each project gives students the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with real-world data, and produce their own reports. They use step-by-step instructions, plus a combination of curated data sets and publicly available data to investigate a topic, whether it’s the effect of a sugar tax, measuring wellbeing or inequality, or analysing climate change data.

We created Doing Economics because “The best way to think as an economist is to act as an economist,” says Carlos Cortinhas, a professor of economics at the University of Exeter Business School, “Working with real data, covering real-life issues like climate change, allows students to really understand and apply economic and statistics concepts.”

This has linked educational benefits:
•    It helps them to develop general data-handling and presentation skills that they can use in their courses or the workplace.
•    It helps them understand and remember the societal issues that we discuss in our ebook.
•    It also teaches what abstract statistical concepts—in this case, different measures of inequality—really mean, and why they are important and interesting.

Students need to learn how to clean the data. If you give students a fake dataset they just analyse the data you give them. But if you give them access to a data source instead, they can extend the analysis, and it’s much more exciting for them. SMi also do show them there’s a function in Excel, and how to calculate it, and how to interpret what Excel tells them. This will help students realise that statistics doesn’t have to be scary.