Courses in experimental design usually provide students with a set of possible designs and corresponding methods of analysis but fail to offer them opportunities for using these new "tools" to solve actual problems. This situation is unfortunate since some of these students may eventually be required to give advice to researchers planning experiments without ever having experience the joys, frustrations, or compromises involved in conducting an experiment. In fact, with the advent of cooperative, internship, and work-study programs, the student is being requested to give advice even sooner than in the past. How can these students, who have never been confronted by time or cost constraints, choice of appropriate factors, or design of follow-up experiments fully appreciate the problems their clients face? This paper describes in detail the computer package which we have developed for this purpose and outlines its use as a teaching aid. Following more than ten years of combined experience with this package, we believe that it is a unique, extremely versatile, and powerful tool not only for use in experimental design courses, but in regression, sampling, multivariate, and introductory courses as well.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education