Simulation and Bootstrapping for Teaching Statistics

Some key ideas in statistics and probability are hard for students including sampling distributions Com puter simulation lets students gain experience with and intuition for these concepts Bootstrapping can reinforce that learning and provide a way for stu dents and future practitioners to estimate sam pling distributions when they have data but do not know the underlying distribution Bootstrapping also frees us from the requirement to teach infer ence only for statistics for which simple formulas are available we can bootstrap robust statistics like the median as easily as the mean For the promise of simulation and bootstrapping to be realized they must be available and easy to use in general purpose statistical software complete with the exploratory data analysis and inferential capabilities required in teaching and practice We discuss some of the available software for simulation and bootstrapping in particular software built on S Plus