[R-sig-teaching] R in intro stats

[Martin Maechler]

I may state the obvious, but just in case it ain't.. :

We have been using R for intro stats courses here at ETH only
for engineer- or math- like students (and continue to do so),
but not for e.g., biology or environmental science students.

However, starting this fall, we (well, most of our faculty) are
using or plan to use  Professor John Fox'  "RCmdr" ('R
Commander')  instead of the GUI stats package ('SyStat' I believe). 
One nice goal of the RCmdr is to give students a simple GUI but
simultaneously expose them to the language (which is visibly
produced by GUI clicking) such that they learn part of it "by
the way", and are lured into using it for things that go beyond
the GUI. 

I could also envisage to use the R Cmdr for the first half of
class and then to switch almost completely to "command line"
i.e., rather an R-aware smart editor such as Tinn-R, Emacs,
WinEdt, Kate, or the one that comes with R for MacOS X.

Martin Maechler, 
ETH Zurich

>>>>> "Bob" == Bob Dobrow <rdobrow at carleton.edu>
>>>>>     on Fri, 27 Oct 2006 08:24:12 -0500 writes:

    Bob> I'm glad to see this sig list up and running.
    Bob> I'm planning to use R for my *intro* stats class in the Winter. This is 
    Bob> an experiment,
    Bob> as our intro stats classes all use SPSS. So I'm using R for this one 
    Bob> section (out of about 8 sections
    Bob> a year).  I want to see (1) how easy/hard it is for
    Bob> students to work in a command line environment and (2) whether there is some
    Bob> pedagogical advantage to working with command lines rather than just 
    Bob> point-and-click.

    Bob> We've taken our GUI-based SPSS lab manual and rewritten it for R. If 
    Bob> anyone would like to see it I can make it available. I'll probably need 
    Bob> to supplement it with some very basic intro tutorials or
    Bob> worksheets giving basic introduction. I do not intend to have these 
    Bob> students (mostly poli sci,
    Bob> econ and bio) writing scripts. But I do intend to use R lots in-class 
    Bob> simulations and
    Bob> presentations. If anyone has used R in the intro class I'd be interested 
    Bob> in hearing your experiences.

    Bob> Bob Dobrow
    Bob> Carleton College