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The Dart Board Simulator
The page you get to by clicking the link below is an attempt to show the idea behind the Standard Error of the Mean (SEM). In it there is a simulation of someone throwing darts at a dartboard. You will not see the dartboard, but given the positions of the darts one can make an educated guess on where the centre of the dartboard is located. As one can see one can guess where the centre is located with ever higher precision and accuracy as the number of points increases, even though the standard deviation is not changing that much. The idea behind the SEM is that one can use it to make an estimate of how close the average is to the true value. So instead of using the average +/- the SD one can use the average +/- the SEM. The SEM is calculated as the SD/the square root of the number of data points.
So, go to the Dart Board simulator.
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