[R] A comment about R

[Gregory Snow]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch 
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Liaw, Andy
> Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2006 6:26 AM
> To: 'Patrick Burns'; John Maindonald
> Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] A comment about R

[snip]

> Any suggestion on how to go about getting kids that young on 
> (R) programming?

For those of us in the US look at:
http://www.amstat.org/education/index.cfm?fuseaction=adoptas

I expect that some of the other stats organizations have similar
Adopt-A-School programs.

Last year I was in my daughter's 3rd grade class helping with a party
when I noticed a large posterboard that had the heights in inches of all
the students, since I had run out of apple juice to pour and was getting
a little bored, a went over to the chalk board next to it and made a
quick stem-and-leaf plot of the data.  The teacher was interested in
what I had done and came over and had me explain the stem and leaf plot
to her (she had used the data to talk about averages (mean and median,
but not by that name) and spread (general concept, not computing
anything)).

My other daughter (6) also brought home a homework to show me where they
had been given candy hearts (it was in February) and they had colored in
boxes corresponding to the colors of their hearts to make a basic bar
graph.  I showed her how I could do the same thing on my laptop using R
(I even colored the bars to match her graph and used the symbol font
with text to put colored hearts under the bars like hers had), she was
impressed enough to make me print the graph so she could show her
teacher.

There are 2 opourtunities that I should have followed up on more, now I
just need to get things in gear and do a more formal adopting of their
school.

-- 
Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D.
Statistical Data Center
Intermountain Healthcare
greg.snow at intermountainmail.org
(801) 408-8111