Over the past few years more and more schools have been able to gain access to computers. Many have their own terminals, and can work on-line, others send their material to a centre for batch processing. This article looks at some examples of the way such computing facilities can be used in the teaching of statistics. Clearly much more work can be done with interactive programs carried out on-line, but a great deal can be done with off-line facilities. Two difficulties with statistics are that experiments can take a long time and that the resulting computations can become tedious. In both cases the main statistical ideas can get lost in the sheer drudgery involved. One undeniable advantage of a computer is that it does things quickly. It is putting these two facts together that can make computers a useful tool in the teaching of statistics.

Peter is a lively lad. All systems are at ‘go’. He will usually eat when he’s hungry, like any healthy boy.

There was no trouble about lunch last Saturday. It was roast chicken with bread sauce—one of his favourites. He tackled it with relish, and we were smoothly through to pudding at a brisk rate of knots.

But today things are different. He’s hungry all right, and it’s roast chicken again. But he won’t make a start. Why not? Now that he’s six he knows what he likes, and Mum has forgotten the bread sauce. Would you believe it? But it’s too late to make some now, so we shall all have to be satisfied without it.

In his Newtonian studies Alexandre Koyré remarked that, from the area law of planetary motion, Kepler erroneously deduced that the planets move in their orbits with speeds inversely proportional to the distances from the sun. It was this assertion, which I suspected to be false, that led me to make a detailed study of the discovery of the area law. Quite independently and unknown to me, Curtis Wilson had been making a similar study of the discovery of the elliptical orbit. Since the arguments leading to the two Keplerian laws are inter-dependent, our researches may be described as variations on the same theme. What I wish to do this evening is to explain in simple terms our reconstruction of Kepler’s path to the elliptical orbit and the area law.