How do you explain what a confidence interval means?

A confidence interval, you can think of this as kind of a net, a net that captures the potential region where a population parameter lies. So in general, you calculate confidence intervals by taking the point estimate, and adding and subtracting the margin of error. For proportions, this looks like taking the sample proportion, so if you had 6 out of 10, people answer yes on a particular question, then your sample proportion is 60%. So for proportions, you would take the sample proportion of your data, and you add or subtract the margin of error. For numerical data, it's gonna work very similarly, where you take the sample statistic, and you add or subtract the margin of error. For numerical data, you take the sample mean, and you add or subtract the margin of error, the margin of error is going to determine how confident you are in where you believe that population parameter lies. If we're talking about the number of hours students spend online, then you could ask a sample of 100 students and find out how many hours on average they spend online, but confidence intervals allow you to generalize that calculation by giving some margin of error, basically.