[R] Teaching R in 40 minutes. What should be included?

[Spencer Graves]

      I agree with Thomas and Georg:  A 40 minute intro should be mostly 
Marketing and very little "how to". 

      I think you'll have a more effective sales job if you target, say, 
4 examples averaging 5 slides each plus some general overview, max 25-30 
slides.  If I had sufficient prep time and a few collaborators among 
physicists, geographers, etc., I might get their help in preparing 
examples, showing how they would do something in Matlab or Scilab or 
something else vs. R.  And I'd end with a discussion of technical 
support via an R site search and r-help and showing a list of available 
contributed packages.  I'd do a couple of searches for physics and 
geographical questions.  ODESOLVE, maps, etc.  Maybe pick examples that 
are part of the help files.  Then show, here is how I find X, here is 
the vignette, help or whatever. 

      Is it fair to say that R is rapidly becoming (if it is not 
already) the primary platform of choice for new statistical algorithm 
development?  I think they might be interested in a brief overview of 
the contributed software.  If this is an academic audience, they might 
like to know how easy it is to contribute software, plus journal on 
statistical computing and graphics, etc. 

      hope this helps.  Good Luck!
      spencer graves    

Thomas Schönhoff wrote:

>Hello,
>
>Am Freitag, 25. Februar 2005 22:37 schrieb Dr Carbon:
>  
>
>>If _you_ were asked to give a 40 minute dog and pony show about R
>>for a group of scientists ranging from physicists to geographers
>>what would you put in? These people want to know what R can do.
>>
>>I'm thinking about something like:
>>
>>A. Overview
>>B. data structures
>>C. arithmetic and manipulation
>>D. reading data
>>E. linear models using glm
>>F. graphics
>>G. programming
>>H. other tricks like rpart or time series analysis?
>>    
>>
>
>If your audience is well known I would be inclined to target some 
>(simple) examples derived from physics and geography to demonstrate 
>basic ideas of working with R, similar like the ones listed above.
>
>Well, 40 minutes are not too long, so I recommend to simplify your 
>presentation as much as you can. You want teach them R in 40 minutes 
>but rather tend to confuse them if you don't shorten your plan a bit.
>I.E. teaching programming in R in a few minutes for scientists who are 
>not at all acustomed to programming  is much overhead, I think.
>Well, it's up to your estimation on what is expected to follow your 
>presentation. If you are sure that most of them know enough 
>programming to unterstand the basic concepts in R-programming, 
>everything will be fine!
>If not, I'd recommend  to concentrate on basic operations (data 
>structures, arithmetic and manipulation, import/export data and some 
>often used default statistical procedures demonstrating common tasks 
>(is time series analysis important in physics or geography, I don't 
>know??), including some remarks on diffenrences to widespread 
>statistical packages like SPSS or SAS, maybe LispStat.
>Finally there shouuld be some extended view of available ressources 
>(manuals, FAQ, community) as a starter to learn, use and program R by 
>themselves.
>I think this would do for a 40 minutes presentation without taking the 
>risk to deter people due to overcomplexity.
>
>regards
>Thomas
>
>______________________________________________
>R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>  
>