[R-sig-teaching] purpose of list

[hadley wickham]

> As a casual observation I am now in my third year of teaching basic
> statistics to biology/ecology students with a mix of Minitab and R.
> Outside the formal teaching, I have used R with selected students for
> 6 or 7 years (students who want to work at home, students with
> Macs/Linux at home, and my personal dissertation students).
>
>  In the first year I use Minitab and in the second year I use R.
> Classes are around 30 students in first year and 20 in second year.
>
> In all three years, unprompted by me, I have had between five and
> seven students come to me after the R sessions asking why we hadn't
> used R in first year. They find the command line more direct and
> immediate than Mintab, which, it seems, they had found confusing. This
> year I asked the whole  2nd year class to vote on whether they would
> have preferred R to Mintab in 1st year. Everyone voted for R.

This matches my experience in a course which I taught both Excel and
R.  Most students preferred R because it was much harder to follow
what I was doing in the GUI - where exactly was I clicking, was it a
right or left click, etc.  With R you see everything I type and it's
very easier to reproduce.  It's also much faster and easier to produce
a page of commented R code that allows students to reproduce all the
important steps, compared to recording a screencast to show the steps
in Excel.

Hadley

-- 
http://had.co.nz/