This is not required. It is here for your interest/fun/use, as a possible aid in understanding chance variation and sampling.

The Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics is a publicly available online resource for basic statistics developed by David Lane under funding from the National Science Foundation. The Simulations/Demonstrations sections are the ones that contain several examples relevant to Stat220, notes Section 6.

Your laptop/computer will probably have no problems with this web site (though mine did). The information from our computer person in the Statistics Department is
'Most' computers should be capable of displaying the java programs on this site. The only hitch is that if a student is unable to run the site they may need to install the "Java Runtime Environment (JRE)" located at: http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp

The two sections of most use for Stat200 are:
1) Sampling distribution simulation.
For the choice of Parent population: try Normal and Uniform at least (``painting'' your own weird distribution is also fun).
Do a few "animated". Then try larger number of samples (e.g. 1,000 in panel 2).
Reset the sample size in panel 3 to N=16 (for example) instead of 5. etc. etc.

2) Confidence Intervals.
For this one, the Instructions page and the Java Applet panel are almost self-explanatory. Keep clicking sample, and see the results. Note the little table of counts is cumulative until you click the "Clear" button.