I applaud your goals and what I can see on Amazon looks good. In addition to inertia and addiction to graphing calculators, high shcool teachers (I've worked with them in AP Stats. for 20 years or so) are concerned about access and equity. Students can take the TIs anywhere. There is no guarantee that students will have a suitable computer or Internet access at home. Many high schools have very limited computer labs but the TIs can be used in a regular classroom. My counter to all that is that you can run R on computers people are paying the recycling center to haul away. But there is no organized effort to make use of that resource. In addition to gathering up the computers, one needs to find spaces to put them in.
Years ago I made a scientific version of Puppy Linux that included R and lots of other math. software. That meant your recycling center computer did not have to have a working/legal OS. Or even a working hard drive! I posted a link to your book on Amazon in the AP Statistics Community. There is a small but growing number of R users there. ----- Forwarded message from Brian Dennis <[email protected]> ----- Date: Tue, 17 May 2016 14:45:30 -0700 From: Brian Dennis <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: [R-sig-teaching] Teaching R in high school and college science and math courses 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 ----- End forwarded message ----- -- -------> First-time AP Stats. teacher? Help is on the way! See http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Stat_Inst/Stats2007/Bob%20Hayden/Relief.html _ | | Robert W. Hayden | | 614 Nashua Street #119 / | Milford, New Hampshire 03055 USA | | | | email: bob@ the site below / x | website: http://statland.org | / '''''' _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching
