[R] introducing R to high school students

[Hadley Wickham]

> 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 think those are good topics to cover, but the order is wrong - start
with graphics.  They are immediately useful and you can start with
built in datasets (although I'd recommend finding a package with more
interesting/bigger datasets than the base packages).  Once you've
shown them how to use graphics to understand data you can talk more
about how it works - what is a dataframe, how you load data in R, etc.

That's the path I follow when I teach R (http://stat405.had.co.nz/,
http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/assessment.html), and I find it to be
successful at keeping students motivated enough to work through the
initial frustrations of learning a new language.  R is not too
difficult for high-school students to learn, but you need to make sure
you provide them with tools to do things that they're interested in -
finding interesting problems that they _want_ to solve is most of the
battle.

Hadley

-- 
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/