[R] introducing R to high school students

[William Dunlap]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf
> Of Hadley Wickham
> Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 10:37 AM
> To: Christopher W Ryan
> Cc: R-help
> Subject: Re: [R] introducing R to high school students
> 
> > 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.

If the students are in a "science research" class, does that mean they
have data from their own research that they would want to understand
better?  I think that would be much more motivating than anything else.

  "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood,
   divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the
   vast and endless sea."  [Antoine de St. Exupery]

Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com

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