dStat

Interactive Visualization Tool for Introductory Statistics

dStat is an interactive visualization tool that can be used by introductory statistics students. It can display dot plots, histograms, box and whisker plots and compute several key descriptive statistics (e.g. mean, mode, standard deviation, quartiles, etc). It also can be used to display discrete probability distributions (e.g. binomial distributions) as well as continuous probability distributions (e.g. normal distributions and Student T distributions). Enter in a hypothesis test, and dStat will show graphically where the critical value, test statistic, P-Value are for both one tale and two tale normal (i.e. tests about a proportion) and Student T (tests about a mean) hypothesis tests. Finally, dStat can do regression analysis and show the line of best fit as well as Pearson coefficient and regression coefficient for some data.

dStat is NOT intended to be a replacement for a full statistics package (such as MiniTab). Instead, dStat is meant to be an interactive graphically tool that gives the statistics students an opportunity to see visually what statistical values mean. Click on the normal curve, and the area (probability) to the left and right are automatically recomputed along with the z-score and unnormalized value.

A free, portable version of this software is also available under Windows. The windows version includes the ability to save images of graphs. For the statistics teacher, the Windows version offers a way to display a problem at the same time as the dStat analysis. This means that when projected on a display, a teacher can discuss the impact of various parts of the displayed problem with students. See http://www.engon.org/dStat/dStat.html for more information about the windows port.

Finally, note that this application is made for tablets or other large screen devices. I have not tried to make it work for small screen devices where fonts are most likely unreadable.