Using Simulation, Sports, and the Www to Help Students Experience Experimental Design

Given an assumption that students can best learn and appreciate concepts involved with creating and analyzing experimental designs by actually performing their own statistical experiments, the question facing many instructors is, “How can we best provide interesting situations which allow students to practice the design techniques that are discussed in class”? We describe several settings that encourage students to investigate a clearly delineated problem, design an experiment (or series of experiments) to collect data to address the problem, and then analyze that data to move towards some resolution to the problem. Situations include a simple task to “fill” a coin with water, efforts to improve one’s golf game, and more elaborate simulations in which multifactor experiments can be performed over the World Wide Web.