[R] Re: GUI's for teaching

[Martin Henry H. Stevens]

To encourage faculty who desire a GUI, I would just like to throw my 2 
cents in as both a "student" of statistics and faculty member in botany:
Command line approaches allow me to replicate my work, and allow my 
students to replicate their work, AND allow me to replicate my students' 
work. The beautiful introductions to, or samples of, the command line 
interface included in, for example, Paradis, Maindonald, Venables and 
Ripley, Pinheiro and Bates provide the psychological boast required for 
non-computer folks, and over the weeks of a course (or months of a project) 
students can get used to the command line approach. My God! They've been 
getting by with SAS for years!

For what it was worth,
Hank


At 01:07 PM 6/25/2002, A.J. Rossini wrote:
> >>>>> "tony" == Tony Plate <tplate at blackmesacapital.com> writes:
>
>     tony> Maybe something of wider value than a GUI (for teaching and other
>     tony> purposes) could be an interface like that in Mathematica (and 
> Maple?),
>     tony> which supports mathematical notation and plots in a command window.
>     tony> This allows showing students exactly what they need to do to
>     tony> accomplish some task, and well as the all the output they 
> should see.
>
>Suprisingly enough, 80% of what is needed to make this work does exist
>(and a bit more work would finish it off).  However, it doesn't exist
>using the particular tools many of those would want to see (there is a
>bit more work to do to make ESS + SWeave + Noweb + XEmacs do precisely
>this, but it suffers from the same problems mentioned for the GUI
>(lack of time, comparatively "amateur" (others' words/opinions, not
>necessarily mine) interface compared to say a half-decent MS Windows
>program.
>
>best,
>-tony
>
>--
>A.J. Rossini                            Rsrch. Asst. Prof. of Biostatistics
>U. of Washington Biostatistics          rossini at u.washington.edu
>FHCRC/SCHARP/HIV Vaccine Trials Net     rossini at scharp.org
>-------------- http://software.biostat.washington.edu/ ----------------
>FHCRC: M: 206-667-7025 (fax=4812)|Voicemail is pretty sketchy/use Email
>UW:   Th: 206-543-1044 (fax=3286)|Change last 4 digits of phone to FAX
>(my tuesday/wednesday/friday locations are completely unpredictable.)
>
>
>
>-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
>r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
>Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
>(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
>_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._ 
>

Martin Henry H. Stevens, Assistant Professor
338 Pearson Hall
Botany Department
Miami University
Oxford, OH 45056

Office: (513) 529-4206
Lab: (513) 529-4262
FAX: (513) 529-4243
http://www.muohio.edu/~botcwis/bot/henry.html

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._