Dynamic Interactive Visualizations: Implications of Seeing, Doing, and Playing for Quantitative Analysis Pedagogy

Teaching relatively complex quantitative topics in statistics, operations management, and management science to undergraduate as well as graduate students can pose numerous pedagogical challenges. However, several topics in these disciplines are amenable to exposition by means of dynamic interactive visualizations. We present a sample of such visualizations and discuss their implications for pedagogy. We also discuss how optimization modeling and a single data set can be leveraged to expose students to multiple variants of covering models and, more importantly, how visualizations can be used to quickly demonstrate the differences in these models. We present empirical evidence that by using dynamic interactive visualizations we are able to enhance the student learning experience.