From the opening and closing paragraphs:
Many mathematics departments around the country offer an introductory statistics course for the general education student. Typically these students come to the mathematics classroom with minimal skills in arithmetic and algebra. In addition it is not unusual for these students to have very poor attitudes toward mathematics.
With this target population in mind one can design courses of study, called statistics, that will differ radically depending on what priorities are held. Many people choose to teach arithmetic through statistics and thereby build most of the course around descriptive statistics with some combinatorics. Others build most of the course around combinatorics and probabilities with some descriptive statistics. Few courses offered at this level spend much time or effort on statistical inference.
We believe that for the general education student the ideas of statistical inference and the resulting decision rules are of prime importance. This belief is based on the assumption that general education courses are included in the curriculum in order to help students to gain an understanding of their own essence, of their relationship to others, of the world around them, and of how man goes about knowing.
If you inspect most of the texts on the market today, you will find that they generally require that a student spend approximately a semester of study of descriptive statistics and probability theory before attempting statistical inference. This makes it very difficult to get to the general education portion of the subject in the time allotted most general education courses. If you agree with the analysis of the problem to this point the logical question is ‘Is there a way to teach statistical inference without the traditional work in descriptive statistics and probability?’. The remainder of this article describes an approach that allows one to answer this question with a yes…
It should be pointed out that there are some unusual difficulties in this approach to statistics [since] one trades traditional weakness in arithmetic and algebra for deficiencies in writing since the write-ups of the simulations demand clear and logical exposition on the part of the student. However, if you feel that the importance of ‘statistics for the general education student’ lies in the areas of inference and decision rules, then you should try this approach. You will like it.
This article won the 1978 George Polya award for expository excellence. Several techniques described this article probably would be modified with modern computer simulation today, but are still worthy of reading.
Mean Green Math 