Students leave the course with practical computer-based skills and, if they own the ActivStats CD, with a functional statistics package. Students discover for themselves many of the key ideas of statistics. Discovered concepts are easier to retain and tend to fit together into a coherent whole more completely. In the challenging areas of probability and inference, ActivStats treats the computer as a laboratory for random phenomena, providing truly random experimental results. Animated tools in ActivStats behave like real-world objects.
Realistic animations are more compelling and more effective for teaching.
The best time to teach a concept or definition is when the student asks about it. But students must be able to find answers quickly and easily. The Glossary is context-sensitive, often citing the example under discussion at that point in the lesson. The glossary and index are linked together, so it is easy to find not just a definition, but also the point in the course that first discussed the concept. Statistics is about understanding the world through data.