Hi fellow R-philes, My contention is that R is not just for statistics. Rather, R can be used in math and science classes in colleges, community colleges, and even high schools, to replace most uses of graphing calculators and proprietary spreadsheets.
Various aspects of R seem to have immense potential for helping STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education: (1) With R, scientific calculations and graphs are fun and easy to produce. A student using R can focus on the scientific and mathematical concepts without having to pore through a manual of daunting calculator keystroke instructions. The students would be analyzing data and depicting equations just as scientists are doing in labs all over the world. (2) R could be learned once and used across a wide variety of STEM courses, promoting the integration of STEM subjects that has been much discussed in principle but elusive in practice. (3) R is now probably the most universally available computational tool (aside from counting on fingers). Many students access a computer to use social media, and most schools and colleges have institutional machines (of varying quality) available to the students. Versions of R exist for most platforms (going back 10 years or more), so R could be made instantly available to every student in every course. (4) R invites collaboration. Students can work in groups to conduct projects in R, build R scripts, and improve each others’ work. Results on a computer screen are easier to view in groups than on a calculator. At home, students can work cooperatively online with R. Every new class can build new accomplishments upon those of previous classes. R builds on itself. (5) R skills follow a student to college and professional life. College statistics and advanced science courses are increasingly teaching R. R skills are a becoming a valuable professional credential in sci-tech, data analytic, and finance firms. (6) R tutorial websites and videos for beginners are now widespread and free. I have taught R as a guest teacher in 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th grades (& am a university statistician/scientist by profession). The kids love it and take to it with gusto. R seems to them like a real important thing when they produce, all by themselves, beautiful graphs of important concepts. Toward the goal of popularizing R as a general product for scientific graphs and calculations, I wrote a book, "The R Student Companion". It is an inexpensive paperback modeled in a "lab manual" format. Naturally, so many free instructional resources are available for R that instructors can bring R into courses without needing extra books. However, my book is targeted at a high school level audience, having just a little algebra, and it contains real, compelling scientific examples and computational exercises and projects. The value-added convenience, and the fact that the book ports across many courses, seem to me to make the book a bargain. Publisher website here: https://www.crcpress.com/The-R-Student-Companion/Dennis/p/book/9781439875407 Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Student-Companion-Brian-Dennis/dp/1439875405 Read reviews here: http://webpages.uidaho.edu/~brian/reviews_of_RSC.pdf Readin', Rritin', Rithmetic, and R! Enjoy! Brian Dennis Professor of Wildlife and Statistics University of Idaho [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching
