[R] introducing R to high school students

[R. Michael Weylandt]

In addition to whatever feedback you may get here, you might subscribe
to the SIG-Teaching list for another interested population.

Michael

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 10:46 PM, Christopher W Ryan
<cryan at binghamton.edu> wrote:
> I participate peripherally on a listserve for middle- and high-school
> science teachers. Sometimes questions about graphing or data analysis
> come up. I never miss an opportunity to advocate for R. However, the
> teachers are often skeptical that their students would be able to
> issue commands or write a little code; they think it would be too
> difficult. Perhaps this stems from the Microsoft- and
> spreadsheet-centered, pointy-clicky culture prevalent in most US
> public schools. Then again, I have little experience teaching this age
> group, besides my own kids and my Science Olympiad team, so I respect
> their concerns and expertise.
>
> I don't know yet what software they generally use, but I suspect MS
> Excel and SPSS.
>
> Now I have to put my money where my mouth is. I've offered to visit a
> high school and introduce R to some fairly advanced students
> participating in a longitudinal 3-year science research class.
>
> I anticipate keeping things very simple:
> --objects and the fact that there is stuff inside them. str(), head(), tail()
> --how to get data into R
> --dataframes, as I imagine they will mostly be using single,
> "rectangular" datasets
> --a lot of graphics (I can't imagine that  plot(force, acceleration)
> is beyond a high-schooler's capability.)
> --simple descriptive statistics
> --maybe t-tests, chi-square tests, and simple linear regression.
>
> Alas, probably more than we would have time to cover.
>
> Has anyone done anything with R in high schools?
>
> Thanks.
>
> --Chris Ryan
> SUNY Upstate Medical University
> Binghamton Clinical Campus
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.