Interactive Undergraduate Statistical Computing Laboratory

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The Department of Statistics is committed to the utilization of appropriate technology to increase the learning experience of students. The present initiative is aimed toward the Statistics 100 (STAT100) course, a general education course. The primary goal of STAT100 is to enhance students' capabilities as intelligent consumers of quantitative information. The essential concepts of statistics are emphasized rather than a variety of statistical techniques. The students tend to be bright but not technologically oriented, coming from more than 100 different majors. Most are freshmen or sophomores, and about two-thirds are women. The enrollment has grown rapidly in the past several years and is currently at about 400 students per semester. For several years, an innovative and extremely easy-to-use computer program, developed in the department, has been used in one-fourth to one-half of the classes to increase students' hands-on involvement with statistical data and with statistical and probabilistic experiments. This project makes possible on-line communication between students and the instructor, and among students themselves, and provides opportunities for on-line assignments, quizzes, projects, etc. In order to bring the advantages of the statistical and conferencing software to all of the sections of STAT100, the department is enhancing its undergraduate computer laboratory. Previously, there have been only eight computers that could be utilized for this project, four of which are only marginally effective. Through this latest enhancement, the number of useful PCs is being increased to 25.