Teachware quantlets comprise a basic set of interactive, illustrative examples in introductory statistics. For the student, they provide an opportunity to understand some important basic concepts in statistics through trial and error. For the teacher, they can aid instruction by allowing the students to work independently on exploratory examples at their own pace. Additionally, with a modicum of understanding of the XploRe programming language, the teacher can modify these examples to fit his/her own preferences.
Overall, these quantlets can play a key role in bringing current technology into classroom instruction -- something that is particularly crucial in beginning-level statistics classes. Statistics is often difficult for students since it requires the coordination of quantitative and graphical insights with mathematical ability. These quantlets provide a way in which this coordination can be made easier by allowing the student to develop his/her quantitative and graphical insight without getting bogged down in the mathematics (which can be learned later). That is, the underlying mathematics can be learned after the student has developed an intuitive understanding of certain concepts, which makes the learning process much easier. Moreover, these quantlets are designed for interactive learning, whereby the student actively participates in the learning process (i.e. try out different ideas and see what happens), rather than passively reads or hears about something outside of his/her control. This example of learning by doing has proven to be most effective in the learning process.
Furthermore, as statistical problems in general use mathematical formulas and data sets that grow in size and complexity, computer knowledge is essential to those who work with statistics. Learning with quantlets can give a student valuable comfort and skill with computers early on.
The teachware quantlets are part of the tware library. In order to access this, the user must call this library:
library("tware")After this library has been loaded, the user has a choice of the following examples:
The following pages will describe each example in detail.