Software for learning and for doing statistics

The community of statisticians and statistics educators should take responsibility for the evaluation and improvement of software quality from the perspective of education. The paper will develop a perspective, an ideal system of requirements to critically evaluate existing software and to prodcue future software more adequate both for learning and doing statistics in introductory courses. Different kinds of tools and microworlds are needed. After discussion general requirements for such programs, a prototypical ideal software system will be presented in detail. It will be illustrated how such a system could be used to construct learning environments and to support elementary data analysis with exploratory working style.