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#Minitab for students how to
#Minitab for students professional

#Minitab for students how to

In 1976, The Minitab Handbook detailed how to use the software in the classroom. For example, the amount of hand calculation required had been a major deterrent to teaching nonparametric methods. Using the computer in an introductory course also made it practical for students to learn more advanced techniques.

Simulation could be used as a learning tool.

Plotting the data in a variety of ways became standard operating procedure.

A large number of real data sets could be studied, enhancing students’ ability to transfer textbook knowledge to practical situations.

Eliminating computational drudgery helped students grasp the important concepts without getting lost in a mass of details.

Its creators laid out four immediate benefits to learning statistics with Minitab: Statistics education has not been the same since. By reducing the amount of heavy computation necessary to make statistical inferences, Minitab gave students more time to think about what their analyses mean.

Using Minitab in introductory courses helped students see the practical value of statistics. With the goal of making statistics easier to learn, Penn State statisticians Tom Ryan, Brian Joiner, and Barbara Ryan created a more accessible version of OMNITAB, which became the first version of Minitab. A package developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, called OMNITAB, was powerful, but not easy to use.

But the statistical packages available for mainframe computers in the mid-1960s weren’t well suited to teaching. Minitab was not the first statistical software. The situation began to change in 1972, when the introduction of Minitab Statistical Software transformed statistical computing into a viable classroom tool. Maurice Lee, dean of business at the University of North Carolina, lambasted the typical introductory statistics course offered in those days: lack of practical relevance, he wrote, “…leads inevitably to the conclusion that the student would be well advised to use the hours now tardily given over to the undergraduate statistics course for attendance at the sessions of almost any other subject offered by the university.”Ī quote attributed to Cornell statistician Walter Federer put it more directly: “If the statistical profession doesn’t do something about the teaching of statistics, other groups will.” Introducing Minitab Analyzing even small data sets under these conditions was an enormous task.īy the end of the 1960s, statistics education faced a crisis. Time permitting, they might be exposed to some theoretical examples of how the calculations they’d been laboring over might be applied in a practical situation. And why wouldn’t it? For weeks upon weeks, students in introductory statistics courses memorized complex formulas and slogged through tedious calculations by hand. But in the years before computers were widely available, statistics filled many students with outright dread. Let’s be honest: most of today’s students aren’t exactly in love with statistics.

#Minitab for students professional

Forty years after its initial release, Minitab remains the leading package used to teach and learn statistics, even as its ease of use has brought it from the university into the professional world, too. Minitab Statistical Software revolutionized statistics education and helped students see data analysis not as a hurdle, but a relevant and vital tool.