Teaching some concepts in statistics greatly benefits from individual practice with immediate feedback. In order to provide such practice to a large number of students we have written a simulator based on an historical event: the loss in May 22, 1968, and subsequent search for the nuclear submarine USS Scorpion. Students work on a simplified…

Computer simulations and animations for developing statistical concepts are often not understood by beginners. Hands-on physical simulations that morph into computer simulations are teaching approaches that can build students' concepts. In this paper we review the literature on visual and verbal cognitive processing and on the efficacy of…

ProbLab is a probability-and-statistics unit developed at the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University. Students analyze the combinatorial space of the 9-block, a 3-by-3 grid of squares, in which each square can be either green or blue. All 512 possible 9-blocks are constructed and assembled in a "bar…

Many students doubt that statistical distributions are of practical value. Simulation makes it possible for students to tackle challenging, understandable projects that illustrate how distributions can be used to answer "what-if" questions of the type often posed by analysts. Course materials that have been developed over two years of classroom…