This lesson, created by the American Association of Statisticians, uses data collected by students to estimate the area of an irregularly shaped three-dimensional object using sampling, sampling variability of the sample mean, and confidence interval estimation.  The approach of estimating area using a confidence interval is an alternative to the Calculus approach of integrating to find the area.  The advantage of using a confidence interval is that one does not need to know the actual function, f(x), describing the object’s shape.