The Xycoon Stock Exchange - is a virtual e-learning environment where students can engage in realistic trading activities and learn about the economic principles of the stock market and its underlying statistical properties. Unlike other trading games the Xycoon Exchange engine is based on a web-based system that was originally developed for creating real-life exchanges. All price fluctuations are the result of bid and ask orders that are processed (in real-time) by the Transaction Handler. The orders are created by participating students, the educator, and a “computer trader” which is enhanced by Artificial Intelligence that is based on past research of actual trading activities and their relationship with external factors such as news messages and various types of economic indicators.

At an undergraduate level, students can learn about the stock market mechanisms in intuitive ways and based on trial-and-error strategies. Detailed, analysis-enhanced logfiles are available to the students and the educator which allows them to communicate about: the trading mechanisms (best bid / best ask); the meaning of typical jargon (bullish / bearish markets); and about simple investment strategies that can be employed.

At the graduate level, students can use the powerful R-based statistical computing framework (www.wessa.net) that empowers them to analyse the stock market time series in real-time, and experience the importance of statistical concepts such as heteroskedasticity, bootstrapping, and other statistical techniques that are typically useful for stock markets. Students are not required to understand the statistical software and there is no need to download or install anything on the client machine. In addition, the computing framework allows the student to “blog” statistical computations in a Compendium Platform for Reproducible Research (www.freestatistics.org) which offers new ways of building true ``constructivist learning environments'' that ultimately lead to social interaction, experimentation, communication, and collaboration. For advanced students, this leads to exciting opportunities where they can redefine the process of decision making: it simply requires them to change the underlying R-code, and disseminate the derived software to peers through the Platform. If such computational changes increase profits, they quickly become popular among other players which leads to changed game dynamics and improved learning.

Another remarkable feature of the Xycoon Stock Exchange is the fact that it allows us to conduct controlled experiments about the interaction between economic scenarios, software usability, trading rules, and learning behaviour of students. The scientist/educator can influence the behaviour of the computer trader, and create custom news messages that allow any scenario to be played with various degrees of speed, complexity, and amount of information. If students are allowed to use the statistical computing framework, it is possible to investigate the effectiveness of e-based statistics learning and the importance of knowledge construction through various feedback and communication mechanisms. For example, it is possible to accurately measure how statistical computations are used by students to: verify results from students or the educator; provide feedback to other students; ask for help or report a problem; make investment decisions, etc...