I spent a lot of time focussing on code as communication to make electronic interaction as easy as possible. Personally, I think this is very important as the majority of my programming work is in collaboration with others spread around the world, who I might see in person at most once a year. I agree with Mark that encouraging cooperation within class makes a big difference. There will usually be a few students who catch on really quickly and can help the others - a good reason for group projects.
For most homeworks, I printed out their submitted code and marked it like you'd mark an essay, with marks for the equivalent of punctuation and sentence structure. Little things like indentation make a big difference to readability. It took a few weeks, but the quality of their code improved considerably (so did mine!) Hadley On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Mark Daniel Ward<m...@purdue.edu> wrote: > Dear Graham, > Actually, I love to communicate with the students by email, but I find it > a nightmare when they email me any code! Sometimes a 1-minute verbal > explanation will take several paragraphs to clarify by email. > I try to be available almost all of the time in my office, so that they > can drop by with occasional questions, even outside of office hours. I also > use a once-per-week lab session to answer questions, and I've noticed that > the students talk to each other during such labs..... and they frequently > answer each other's questions, which is a blessing. > Mark > > > > Graham Smith wrote: >> >> Hadley /Mark >> >> Mark Daniel Ward wrote: >> >>> >>> I'll follow-up on Hadley's comment by noting that I always post the >>> complete >>> R transcript of our class session, so that the students can download it >>> and >>> use it. I also add lots and lots of comments to the file (after class is >>> over), so that they can remember what we did in class. They seem to like >>> this feature of my class. >>> >> >> >> >>> >>> hadley wickham wrote: >>> >>>> >>>> This matches my experience in a course which I taught both Excel and >>>> R. Most students preferred R because it was much harder to follow >>>> what I was doing in the GUI - where exactly was I clicking, was it a >>>> right or left click, etc. With R you see everything I type and it's >>>> very easier to reproduce. It's also much faster and easier to produce >>>> a page of commented R code that allows students to reproduce all the >>>> important steps, compared to recording a screencast to show the steps >>>> in Excel. >>>> >> >> I'm glad to see my experience isn't unique. >> >> I find the ability to email me a bit of code that isn't working a >> fanatastic feature for me. It has always been a nightmare trying to >> diagnose via email what some one is doing wrong with Minitab/Excel. >> >> Graham >> >> _______________________________________________ >> R-sig-teaching@r-project.org mailing list >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching >> > > _______________________________________________ > R-sig-teaching@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching > -- http://had.co.nz/ _______________________________________________ R-sig-teaching@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching