In the Ander City unit, students are hired to help Mayor Enoch to make defensible decisions that are best for the town. The dilemma that students engage involves dealing with multiple perspectives on data. In this story, Mayor Enoch is up for re-election, and he is running under a campaign of innovation. His opponent, Mr. Grant, is challenging the mayor’s innovative agenda, and claims that traditional methods of running the city are superior, and that he has the data to prove it. Mr. Grant has hired a staff whose job is to examine and critique every single decision that the Mayor makes. Desperate for help, and wanting to ensure that he really is making good decisions for his city, the mayor hires Questers to become statistical consultants who can help him stand up for his beliefs—or change them if he must. There are three decisions he needs help with: deciding which brand of bikes to offer for rental in the park; determining whether allowing kids to listen to music while playing will lead to increase time spent at the park, and deciding whether installing a baseball diamond or basketball courts will lead to the biggest age range of people using the space.

The unit creates an opportunity for students to leverage statistical tools in order to address dilemmas that the city is facing. The Ander City unit couples person with content by positioning students to engage legitimately with statistical concepts by challenging them to think specifically about how the tools they choose to use to analyze data are related to their own agendas.

As students help Mayor Enoch evaluate the sensibility of his decisions, they engage three key ideas in statistics: different statistical tools can reveal different insights into data; statistical tools can be used opportunistically to support different perspectives; and beliefs can shape interpretations of results. In this way, students learn about both how to use statistical tools such as mean, median, and mode, and also learn how they work as mechanisms for making decisions about the world. Specific content that is targeted in Ander City includes learning such concepts as connecting data and their representations and making decisions and arguments grounded in data; building skills such as constructing graphs, comparing distributions of data; and understanding how representations and arguments relate to each other as well as how real-world constraints shape the arguments one can make about data.