[R] Problems for 13 year old

[Douglas Bates]

Frank E Harrell Jr <fharrell at virginia.edu> writes:

> On Fri, 24 Jan 2003 08:20:20 -0500
> ggrothendieck at yifan.net wrote:
> 
> >       
> > I would like to teach some scientific/statistical computing to my 13 
> > year old nephew and was considering using R for this.  He has a Mac G3 
> > OS 9.1.
> > 
> > I am looking for ideas for problems that would be interesting and 
> > motivating for someone that age.  I recently taught him the basics of 
> > HTML and noticed that he particularly was intrigued by the ability to 
> > change colors; thus, perhaps problems that involve flashy color plots 
> > would keep his attention.
> > 
> > Thanks for any ideas.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > -----------------------------------------------------
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> 
> I applaud this effort, and am beginning to teach R to my 13 and 10 year olds.  One thing that really grabs their interest is learning commands such as
> 
>    rep('Dad is a task master', 5000)
> 
> and paste(c('Joe','Sally','Roger'),'is not playing with a full deck.')

There was an article in Thursday's New York Times about New York
revising its Math and Reading courses.  The article gave an example of
a data analysis problem from the textbook "Everyday Mathematics" by
SRA/McGraw-Hill.  This text will be adopted by all New York elementary
schools.  It may be sources of other such problems.

There was some discussion on python news groups of an introductory
programming course based on python, which is similar in structure to
the S language.  (Note I said "similar" - no flames please.)  That may
also be a source of examples.