On 1/1/2013 1:09 AM, Christopher W. Ryan wrote:
-- snip --
I conducted an (utterly arbitrary and unvalidated) online survey among
the students a couple weeks in advance, to gauge their familiarity with
what I called "technical computing," i.e. anything beyond commonplace
word-processing, spreadsheets, web surfing, and social media. The
questions were:
1. What operating systems do you know how to work in? Check all that apply.
Windows 19
Mac OS X 12
Linux 2
others 0
2. Do you have a favorite text editor?
Yes 5
No 7
I don't know what a text editor is 7
3. Do you use a two-pane file manager?
Yes 1
No 6
I don't know what a two-pane file manager is 12
4. Have you written programs in any computer language?
Yes 4
No 11
I don't know 4
(the specific languages cited included Basic, Java, Javascript, Ruby,
C++, Python, MS-DOS command prompt batch files.)
Very interesting. You say "science teacher" and not "math teacher".
Were these advanced students, and what "science" were they taking that
they had been using SPSS? Were they doing things with their own data?
In general, topics we covered included:
vectorized mathematics (what I called "bulk math")
generating sequences
(meant to do logical conditions here, but skipped it inadvertantly)
drawing random samples
different kinds of objects (we limited ourselves to scalars, vectors,
dataframes; character, numeric, and factor)
levels of measurement: nominal, ordinal, interval/ratio
exploring objects: str(), head(), tail(), class(), summary()
using in-built data sets provided with R
general principles of good data entry and storage, and the virtues of
plain text. Went over read.table (I meant to do more with reading data
into R, but ran out of time. I sent simple instructions for the foreign
package and read.spss() to their teacher after the fact, since up until
now they had been using SPSS a lot, and several of their data sets were
in that format.)
graphs: boxplots, scatterplots, stripcharts, scatterplot matrices, and
coplots (they liked that last one a lot). Also some graphical
parameters: type=, main=, sub=, col=, xlim=, ylim=, and pch=
Comments to teacher over the subsequent couple of days included:
"This should be taught in high school." "I got to see data for the first
time in a different way." "I had the most fun when I realized I could
play around with the program." (Of course, any less-than-positive
comments, the students (or their teacher) may have kept to themselves!)
I applaud you for trying this. Inspires me to think I should check if
there is a similar desire at the local high school here. Pretty
intimidating notion, though, when I think of the initial push-back I get
from the GUI-raised Masters degree students that I currently work with
<G>. I think you had a nice agenda and were quite smart to feature
graphics. Probably made their graphing calculators look pre-historic
(or maybe they are by now ;-)!
Rob
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