Statistical Cartoons in R

The arrival and widespread adoption of R, as a standard part of the computing environment within the statistics community, has also changed the scene radically by providing easy access to a huge variety of modern statistical tools together with a very flexible computing environment. In addition, R has become increasingly good at providing tools for communicating with some other systems. One example is the tcltk package which is a standard part of R and which allows access to the Tcl/Tk system for creating buttons, sliders and other graphical controls. Spurred on by the availability of these tools, a group in the Department of Statistics at the University of Glasgow has been exploring how they might be packaged in a form which makes it particularly easy for lecturers who have some familiarity with R, but neither time nor inclination to learn other computing systems, to produce useful animated graphs for both teaching and research. Detailed descriptions of the system, called rpanel, are available elsewhere. The aim of this article is to give some simple examples, particularly from the viewpoint of teaching.