Towards a characterization and understanding of students' learning in an interactive statistics environment.

We shall describe episodes of middle school students working on Exploratory Data<br>Analysis (EDA) developed within an innovative curriculum. We outline the program and<br>its rationale, analyze the design of the tasks, present extracts from students' activities and speculate about their learning processes. Finally, from our observations, we propose a new construct -- learning arena, which is suggested as a curriculum design principle, which may also facilitate research.