Computational Thinking for Statisticians: Training by Implementing Statistical Strategy

Students of statistics should be challenged to discover the possibilities computational technology has to offer empirical investigation. This paper describes recent experience with a course in statistical computing that tries to do just that. Features of the course and the computing environment which would allow it to be replicated elsewhere are described. In particular, group projects which have the students design and develop software that implements a largish statistical strategy seem promising. Such a project forces the students to synthesize their statistical knowledge into a workable strat-egy. In so doing, they are exposed to a wide variety of top-ics, computational and statistical, at various levels of detail. Actually producing a software system challenges the compu-tational creativity of the student, whatever their level of com