Introduction

My main purpose in this article is to describe the Probability/Statistics Object Library, abbreviated in this paper as PSOL. This project is supported by a grant from the Course and Curriculum Development Program of the National Science Foundation (award number DUE-0089377 ). The library consists of complete applets and applet components for use probability and statistics instructional materials. All objects in the library (both executable files and source files) are freely available for use, modification, and redistribution under a Creative Commons license.

I place great emphasis on the reusability of the objects in the library. In particular, the applets can be used by teachers in a variety of different courses at different mathematical levels. This versatility comes at a cost however, since a certain amount of work is required on your part to adapt the materials for your courses.

My central premise is that general-purpose, reusable applets and objects can be very useful to teachers and students. Thus, my second goal is to make the case for this premise and encourage the development of object libraries in other areas of mathematics.

Copyright 2004 by Kyle Siegrist

Published October 2004