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I am looking for a tool to demonstrate how the shapes of some basic probability distributions (binomial, hypergeometric, Poisson, exponential and normal) change as a function of their parameters.

I have previously used Matlab's disttool, but I find this cumbersome and visually messy. I could of course make an R script, but for pedagogical reasons I would prefer something with sliders – ideally something the students could play with themselves in their browsers.

I found a Shiny app by Matthew Leonawicz that seemed to be what I'm looking for, but all links to it appear to be dead. The others I have found are all missing the hypergeometric and Poisson distributions.

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    $\begingroup$ David Kahle wrote such an applet: see ww2.amstat.org/publications/jse/v22n2/kahle.pdf. It seems to be no longer available; you might want to contact him about any current or newer versions. $\endgroup$
    – whuber ♦
    Commented Feb 3, 2020 at 14:48

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I finally found out (via this README file) that the mentioned Shiny app by Matthew Leonawicz can be run locally in R with 

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("leonawicz/snapapps")
library(snapapps)
snapp("rv4")

(The description for accessing it online does not work, however.)

I also liked this "Distribution calculator", which is online, although it is missing many probability distributions.

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I found these two apps very useful

  1. Very comprehensive interactive app by Caltech Probability Distribution Explorer

  2. Nice R Shiny app by Probability Distributions

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There are applets available on the website of Dr. Matt Bognar (from University of Iowa) for visualizing probability distributions: these applets have .html extension. I find it extremely useful and simple.

In case the above link is not working, please use this link.

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IF you can write down a parametrized PDF, then the graphing calculator by Desmos Studio is quite convenient: https://www.desmos.com/calculator

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