This is a good motivation, but it's plunging right into formulas, which is wrong-headed. Even the mean can be completely meaningless without eyeballing a plot o

This is a good motivation, but it's plunging right into formulas, which is wrong-headed. Even the mean can be completely meaningless without eyeballing a plot of the data. Given that this is aimed at non-statisticians, it's critical that these points are made in Big Flashing Letters before we start handing out formulas that make people act like they have "superpowers". The first superpower is to look at the data and see if it makes sense using your eyes and your brain, not to start spewing confidence intervals. As other posters have pointed out, it is even more irresponsible to start waving around things like the t-test without discussing the parametric assumptions that these things depend on for their validity.