[R] introducing R to high school students

[Gabor Grothendieck]

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.
>

I have some experience in this and would have to agree with Indrajit
that this is not a good idea.

When I tried to teach R to a high school student it was not very
successful.  Certainly based on that experience the list above is way
too complex.  Don't teach anything on that list at all.  The number of
concepts involved in that is simply overwhelming.  Also avoid teaching
anything that requires complex installation if you want them to be
able to carry it forward by themselves.

I would expect the reaction would be that most will have no interest
and the ones that do will be frustrated by the large number of
concepts needed to get going.

The only part that seemed to trigger any interest was when I showed
the large list of colors available in colors() and then playing with
inserting different colors in:

colors()
plot(1:5, col = "violetred")

Assuming you are committed to this and go ahead, I would divide it
into two parts:

1. a graphics demo -- make it clear its a demonstration so they have
an appreciation of what is possible and you are not actually teaching
anything in this portion.

2. Teach them how to install R, run the above two commands
(substituting in different colors), how to exit and point out that
there are many tutorials in:
http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html
and they can pick one they like (since the official documents will be
over their head).

If you do that then perhaps a small number will have sufficient
interest to try it some more at home but I wouldn't be surprised if
none do and that most or all would prefer something with more
immediate gratification.

-- 
Statistics & Software Consulting
GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc.
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email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com