Minitab: A Statistical Computing System for Students and Researchers

Minitab is a general purpose computing system which was developed for student use in introductory, precalculus, statistics courses. It has been successfully used for this purpose and has gained wide acceptance on the campus in a variety of courses, primarily because of its ease of use, flexibility, and data plotting capabilities. It is patterned in part after the Omnitab system [3, 4], which has been used very successfully in teaching statistics at Iowa State University [5]. No special computing equipment is required. Even though it was designed for use by students in introductory courses, it has also been found useful in several other contexts. It is now being used extensively in more advanced courses and has become the primary computational tool of the Penn State Statistical Consulting Service. In this report we summarize the present state of development of the system and point out by means of some examples how it has been used in introductory