An Online System for Teaching the Design (and Analysis) of Experiments

Most books on experimental design have many exercises at the end of chapters that give students practise in the analysis of completed ex-periments, but students often receive little experience in the design of experiments. Many authors have suggested the use of student designed and run experiments, but this can be logistically costly and time con-suming. Alternatively, computer generated data can be used where every student receives different response values. The difficulty in this approach lies in making simulated data easily available to students. This paper presents a virtual construction machine that, based upon information in a control file, generates a virtual laboratory that is web-accessible and easily used by students. It is very flexible and can accommodate different design objectives by varying the control parameters. A key advantage of this approach is that students can quickly try many different designs on the same experiment and learn to distinguish among designs based on randomization choices.