Resource Library

This site provides the description and instructions for as well as the link to The Self-Avoiding Random Walk applet. In the SAW applet, random walks start on a square lattice and then are discarded as soon as they self-intersect. If a random walk survives after N steps, we compute the square of the distance from the origin, sum it up, and divide by the number of survivals. This variable is plotted on the vertical axis of the graph, which is plotted to the right of the field where random walks travel.

A good resource for problems in statistics in engineering. Contains some applets, and good textual examples related to engineering. Some topics include Monte Carlo method, Central Limit Theorem, Risk, Logistic Regression, Generalized Linear .Models, and Confidence.

This is the description and instructions as well as a link for the Forest Fires and Percolation applet. It builds a background with a "hands-on" activity for the students which then leads to the applet itself. The applet is a game where the object is to save as many trees from the forest fire as possible. It shows the spread of a fire with the variable of density and the probabilty of the number of surviving trees.

Discusses Markov chains, transition probabilities, and the transition probability matrix.

This site offers a collection of applets in which standard topics of statistics and probability are presented in a novel and visual way using computer animated images. Topics include dependence, independence, conditional probabilities, expectation and variance, normal, exponential, Poisson distributions, law of large numbers and the central limit theorem, hypothesis testing maximum likelihood estimation, sampling, chi-square tests, and the construction of confidence intervals.

Discusses the benefits of Taguchi methods applied to engineering.

This applet is a probabilistic study of picking fortunes from a limited supply of fortune cookies. The student will try to answer how many cookies he/she has to eat to have a 50/50 chance of reading all the fortunes.

The user is be able to change the mean and the standard deviation using the sliders and see the density change graphically. The check buttons (68, 95, 99) will help one realize the appropriate percentages of the area under the curve. An example of thiis "68-95-99.7" rule follows.

This applet is a probabilistic study of picking prizes from an unlimited supply of cereal boxes. The applet helps to answer how many boxes of cereal need to be purchased to have a 50/50 chance of getting all the prizes.

This is a basic web application that allows practice with matching points on a scatterplot to the appropriate correlation coefficient, r. Applet provides four scatterplots to match with four numeric correlations via radio buttons. After making selections, students click to see "correct" answers and keep a running total of proportion of correct matches, then may select four more plots.