It is important for students learning statistical reasoning to see data in context. One of the best ways of achieving this is to involve students in data production and so in the past ten years we have had first-year students undertake real experiments of their own choosing as part of our introductory statistics course. However in practice students are limited in what they can do. Many want to conduct experiments involving human subjects, requiring ethics approval, while even those not wanting to use humans may have general health and safety issues. Epidemiological studies have really not been possible at all.

We present an open-ended virtual environment, the Island, to help overcome these limitations while still engaging students with study design and data collection. Students work with a population of virtual humans living on the Island and are able to conduct a wide variety of experiments with them as subjects. The Islanders also live in villages, have ancestors and die from a range of diseases, allowing students to study the epidemiology of the island as well. In this paper we will give an overview of this Island and its design, highlighting some of the features and the issues, and sharing our experiences of using the Island in teaching and learning.

Course projects have been argued to help develop students’ statistical thinking, but implementing authentic and realistic course projects still presents major challenges. This paper evaluated students’ experiences and perceptions of using an online simulated virtual environment, known as the Island, for implementing major course projects within an online masters level introductory statistics course. The use of the Island aimed to overcome significant practical and ethical constraints imposed on project-based work in online courses. The project required students to answer a self-posed research question by gathering and analysing data using methods covered in the course. The project was divided into two parts, a mid-semester proposal and an end of semester online presentation. Following completion of the projects, forty-two students responded to a questionnaire which rated their level of agreement to three aspects of using the Island: engagement, ease of use and contributes to understanding. Students were also asked to provide qualitative comments and five students participated in semi-structured interviews. Qualitative feedback was analysed to help explain the results from the quantitative questionnaire. In conclusion, perceptions of the use of the Island for project-based assessment were very positive. Qualitative feedback provided insight into how the Island-based projects may help to develop students’ statistical thinking.