Dear Chris, Thanks a lot for the detailed report, which I'll keep for reference, and forward to a few colleagues.
Just a question/request, for those of us from other countries: what were the ages of the kids? (grades 10-12 does not mean a lot to me, though, yes, I could google for it). Best, R. On Tue, 01 Jan 2013 02:09:24 -0500,"Christopher W. Ryan" <[email protected]> wrote: > Some of you may recall that a few months ago I solicited advice and > opinions on both R-help and R-sig-teaching about an "introduction to R" > workshop I intended to present to a class of high school students > enrolled in a 3-year longitudinal science research class. Well, I did > it on 8 October, and thought I'd give some follow-up as to how it went, > in case anyone was interested. > The class consisted of about 20 kids, grades 10-12. Each was at a > computer with R installed. It wasn't clear that the students would be > able to install packages, given the school's network setup, so I > confined my plans to base R. We ran for 5 hours, with about a 40-minute > break for lunch. Their science teacher was present for the entire time, > and the school's IT person attended about half of it. They were both > very helpful, both in preparation and in execution. > 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.) > I had my "lesson plan" all laid out in an org-mode file, from which I > typed code into an R console projected on the screen. The students > followed my steps initially, and then broadened out to some > experimentation as the day went on. A couple students were quite skilled > at working ahead, while others struggled a bit, but everyone was > eventually able to get the desired results. They were generally very > engaged, interactive, and enthusiastic. No one left, except for the odd > music lesson here and there. Overall, we had a lot of fun. > I tried to go pretty slowly. I prepared much more that we had time to > cover. I emphasized graphics. I did not get into inferential statistics > or hypothesis testing at all, despite their eagerness to "do a t-test" > and such. Maybe that will come at a future session, if we do one. > 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!) > --Chris Ryan > SUNY Upstate Medical University > Binghamton Clinical Campus > _______________________________________________ > [email protected] mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching -- Ramon Diaz-Uriarte Department of Biochemistry Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas “Alberto Sols” (UAM-CSIC) Madrid Spain Dirección - Address: Laboratorio B-25 Departamento de Bioquímica Facultad de Medicina Universidad Autónoma de Madrid Arzobispo Morcillo, 4 28029 Madrid Spain Phone: +34-91-497-2412 Email: [email protected] [email protected] http://ligarto.org/rdiaz _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching
