The ability to design experiments in an appropriate and efficient way is an important skill, but students typically have little opportunity to get experience. Most textbooks introduce standard general-purpose designs, and then proceed with the analysis of data already collected. In this paper we explore a tool for gaining design experience: computer based virtual experiments. These are software environments which mimic a real situation of interest, and invite the user to collect data to answer a research question. The following prototype environments will be described: an industrial process that must be optimized, a greenhouse experiment to compare the effect of different treatments on plant growth, and an arcade style applet that illustrates the use of t-tests, regression and analysis of variance. These environments are parts of a collection called env2exp, and can be freely used over the web. They have been used in several courses over the last two years.
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