The computer versions of these simulations came out of Bill Trochim's
efforts in the early 1980s to translate some of those Campbell
dice rolling exercises into increasingly available computer technologies.
Previous versions were implemented in a number of the graduate
and undergraduate research methods courses at Cornell over the
years. We owe a great debt to the many students who struggled
with earlier drafts and offered their valuable criticisms and
suggestions.
During the mid-80s Trochim began working with these exercises
with James Davis who, at the time, was T.A. for his graduate-level
methods courses. James improved on them considerably, taking what
were separate exercises and integrating them into a single computerized
simulation that illustrated the three major pre/post research
designs. His efforts led to two co-authored articles on simulation
cited in this workbook.
This current set of exercises was resurrected in the Spring of
1993 initially to provide an interesting and challenging problem
area for Sarita Tyler's Ph.D. qualifying examinations. Essentially
she took a set of file folders that had some poorly xeroxed copies
of the old dice rolling and computer exercises on them, and integrated
these into the coherant package contained here. We had no idea
when she began that this process was going to result in an integrated
workbook -- all she originally intended was to learn something
about simulations. Clearly the present volume would not have happened
without her considerable efforts.
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