IntRo: Software for Introductory Statistics

• Activity Number: 545
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Eric Hare* and Andrea Kaplan
• Companies: Iowa State University and Iowa State University
• Keywords: intRo ; software ; shiny ; web-based ; interactive ; introductory

Abstract

In order for software to be useful to students in their first statistics course, it can't hog the spotlight. Statistics as a subject should shine through as a fun and interesting topic to study, rather than being bogged down by difficult to learn technology. In this talk we introduce a new statistical software package, called intRo, for performing basic data analysis and statistical routines. Leveraging the power of R and Shiny, intRo implements common statistical functions in a modern web-based application, while remaining simple enough for the novice statistician. This simplicity lends itself to a natural presentation in an introductory statistics course as a substitute for other commonly used statistical software packages, such as Excel and JMP. intRo is currently deployed at the URL http://www.intro-stats.com. We demonstrate intRo's use as a facilitator of statistics education by going through real-world homework problems solvable by intRo, analyze how intRo performed in introductory statistics courses at Iowa State University in Spring 2015, and explore challenges that must be addressed in order to expand intRo to other classrooms and universities.