Thanks for reminding me of this book. I especially appreciate the fact that it does not assume you have loaded innumerable libraries. I have found that just installing R can be a challenge for many students, and adding libraries even more so. First, it requires a persistent Internet connection, whereas base R can be installed from a thumb drive or optical disk. Then there is dependency hell, from which the R developers try to shield us, not always successfully. I can remember trying to install a package that makes R more friendly for beginners. It had a long list of dependencies, each with its own dependencies. I think there were 147 in all. Of course, one failed to load, and so the original package could not be installed. I thought a good homework problem would be to determine what the probability of one package loading would have to be in order for the probability of 147 loading to be > 50%.
This book would be a natural for the newish AP Computer Science Principles course. https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-science-principles/about It's obviously relevant to AP Statistics, though teachers there are wedded to graphing calculators, which is encouraged by same being "expected" on the official exam. However, a few AP Stats. teachers do use R, and I have taken the liberty of quoting this message in the AP Statistics online community. FWIW though I think the review by Matloff will offend that audience. While I share his views on the weaknesses of AP Statistics, those weaknesses are shared by a great many college intro. stats. courses. In addition, citing the fact that R is free and graphing calculators cost $100 or so, shows lack of appreciation of the situation on the ground in many high schools. While R itself is free, you have to have a computer to run it on and a readily accessible lab where students can access said computers. Those are NOT free. Students also have access to their calculators at home, which may not be the case for R. ----- Forwarded message from Brian Dennis <[email protected]> ----- Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2020 10:16:19 -0800 From: Brian Dennis <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: [R-sig-teaching] R book for teaching math & science in high school Here is a book that introduces R programming for use in high school or college math and science courses: https://www.crcpress.com/The-R-Student-Companion/Dennis/p/book/9781439875407 The book is written for absolute beginners in programming concepts and is one of the most elementary books about R available. The focus of the book is not statistics per se but rather scientific graphing, calculation, modeling, and simulation. Collected reviews of the book can be found here: https://webpages.uidaho.edu/~brian/reviews_of_RSC.pdf The topics are very vanilla R, no RStudio, no ggplot, no dplyr, etc. The choice of topics was deliberate so as not to overwhelm students. The math level is high school algebra. The scientific examples treated are quite real and engaging. With the move in education toward trying to teach "coding" in schools, one might ask why not use Python, Java, C+, etc. The answer is clear: students can do more cool stuff with R with much less code and computer science overhead. As well, the supporting online instructional environment, with zillions of websites, tutorials, and videos, is hard to beat. For future STEM workers, R is the ideal gateway drug! I have even taught graphing and calculating in R to elementary school students. They are eager and enthusiastic and take to it as fast as the older students. Readin', Ritin', Rithmetic, and R! Brian Dennis, Professor University of Idaho USA [[alternative HTML version deleted]] _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching ----- End forwarded message ----- -- _ | | Robert W. Hayden | | 5 Howard Street, Apartment 206 / | Wilton, New Hampshire 03086 USA | | | | email: bob@ the site below / | website: http://statland.org | x / '''''' _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-teaching
