TILE - Design of Experiments


Lab Description


Pedagogy and How to Play

Screen Shots


Topics - Design Area - Virtual Experiment - Quiz - Challenge round

Example Inputs

Program Design


Lab Description

We developed this lab in an attempt to convey to students some basic elements of an experiment.

From a nontechnical description of an experiment, we want the student to be able to answer the following questions:

For the source of our narratives, we use excerpts of newspaper articles, accompanied by summaries of journal articles. By comparing and contrasting news and journal reports on an experiment, students hone their skills in critical thinking, synthesizing multiple sources and identifying important statistical elements.

Additional important lessons we expect students to take away from this lab address the importance of having comparison groups; randomization; blindness; and generalizing results to populations other than those studied.

We try to present experiments on interesting topics with unusual features or that offer important lessons on the above topics.

To begin, the lab starts with a brief set of instructions and a few sentences on the topic of the lab. Students are then presented with a set of experiments in the Topics window. The instructor can choose any number of practice rounds for the lab, and the experiments can be selected randomly for each student from a subset of those available for the lab.

To begin work on an experiment, the student selects an experiment from the topics window. This brings her to the main work area. The design is presented in the form of a tree. The different levels of the tree represent the different stages in the experiment --