Ward has years of experience teaching fundamental data analysis techniques to students who often have no previous experience with such tools. He emphasizes new computational tools, including R, data visualization, UNIX, bash shell scripting, regular expressions, SQL, XML, etc. Ward firmly believes in team-oriented environments for learning data analysis. He coordinates the Statistics Living Learning Community at Purdue, a $1.5 million NSF grant in which students are immersed in a year-long data analysis environment that blends the undergraduate Statistics coursework with research opportunities, professional development, extracurricular data analysis activities, etc.