SOFTWARE FOR LEARNING AND FOR DOING STATISTICS

The community of statisticians and statistics educators should take re sponsibility for the evaluation and improvement of software quality fr om the perspective of education, The paper will develop a perspective, an ideal system of requirements to critically evaluate existing softw are and to produce future software more adequate both for-learning and doing statistics in introductory courses, Different kinds of tools an d microworlds are needed. After discussing general requirements for su ch programs, a prototypical ideal software system will be presented in detail. It will be illustrated how such a system could be used to con struct learning environments and to support elementary data analysis w ith exploratory working style.