DESIGNING A FIRST EXPERIMENT - A PROJECT FOR DESIGN OF EXPERIMENT COURSES

A project suitable for use as a first and last assignment given in an introductory experimental design course is outlined, and its implement ation discussed. Phase 1 of the project is designed to be given at the beginning of a first course in experimental design and involves desig ning an experiment within instructor-specified parameters based initia lly on intuition and common sense. Phase 2, at the conclusion of the c ourse, represents the final assignment of the course and encourages th e student to critique their first design, suggest a ''new and improved '' design based on their newly acquired knowledge, and finally conduct an analysis of computer generated data (here using MINITAB, although choice of package is flexible) from an actual run of their experiment.