[R] Sources for open sourced homework questions for R?

[David Kane]

Hi,

I am teaching a one month class in applied statistics and want to
bring my students up to speed in R without devoting much/any lecture
time to R instruction. I think that the best way to do this is to
provide them with a lot of R questions for homework. These questions
would be numerous (there is a lot of material to cover), go from very
simple to somewhat complex, and focus on all the commands and options
that will be useful in applied work. Here are some of my initial
questions:

------------------------
Q: Load the data from the cars data frame into the local workspace.
A: data(cars)

Q: Find information about the cars data frame.
A: help(cars)

Q: Calculate the dimensions of the data frame.
A: dim(cars)

Q: What are the names of the variables?
A: names(cars)
------------------------

Needless to say, the questions will become more complex, including the
writing of simple functions. I also want to provide answers to all the
questions that, in theory, could be used in an automated fashion to
check the students work. My current plan is to load these questions
(somehow) into the quiz module in Moodle (http://moodle.org/).

Ideally, I would like this system to be usable by very large classes
and even in the context of distance learning. Student goes to a web
page, logs in and is presented with a page of questions (or a single
question). She figures out the answer in her R session and pastes in
the command (or result) into the answer slot on the webpage and pushes
a button (or does it for ten questions first). The server then
determines which questions she got right and which she got wrong. It
might then provide clues to the ones that she has wrong. Once she is
done, the professor gets a list of her results (how many right, how
many wrong, how many required more than one try and so on).

For now, I am not building that system. (Has anyone already done so?)
Instead, I am just creating the collection of R questions/answers that
might go into such a system. I am aiming for around 1,000 questions.
So: Does anyone know of open sourced collections of R questions like
this which I might use?

Thanks,

Dave Kane
Adjunct Instructor, Williams College