[R-sig-teaching] purpose of list

[Graham Smith]

Hadley /Mark

Mark Daniel Ward wrote:
> I'll follow-up on Hadley's comment by noting that I always post the complete
> R transcript of our class session, so that the students can download it and
> use it.  I also add lots and lots of comments to the file (after class is
> over), so that they can remember what we did in class.  They seem to like
> this feature of my class.


> hadley wickham wrote:
>> 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.

I'm glad to see my experience isn't unique.

I find the ability to email me a bit of code that isn't working a
fanatastic feature for me. It has always been a nightmare trying to
diagnose via email what some one is doing wrong with Minitab/Excel.

Graham