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

[hadley wickham]

Hi Dave,

I have a few drills available from http://had.co.nz/stat405 - see the
right hand column, about half way down.  They seem similar in spirit
to what you're thinking of. You might want to look at the "Little
Schemer" for a similar approach with a different programming language.

However, I'm not sure how pedagogically useful this approach is. If
you break things down too finely, you don't teach the problem solving
skills necessary to attack a new problem. Students will try and solve
the problems as rapidly, using as little of their brain as possible.
I also feel like these small problem fail to invoke any intellectually
curiosity - why the heck should I care that mtcars has 32 observations
and 11 rows?

I'd suggest starting with a big problem that's of interest to the
students - how do we detect spam? What determines the price of a used
car on ebay?  Do soap operas influence baby name trends? Are my
facebook friends representative of the university as a whole? Then
talk about how you might attack the problem in general, before getting
to the concrete tools you'd use in R.

Hadley

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 10:48 AM, David Kane <dave at kanecap.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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