[R-sig-teaching] purpose of list

[hadley wickham]

I spent a lot of time focussing on code as communication to make
electronic interaction as easy as possible.  Personally, I think this
is very important as the majority of my programming work is in
collaboration with others spread around the world, who I might see in
person at most once a year.  I agree with Mark that encouraging
cooperation within class makes a big difference.  There will usually
be a few students who catch on really quickly and can help the others
- a good reason for group projects.

For most homeworks, I printed out their submitted code and marked it
like you'd mark an essay, with marks for the equivalent of punctuation
and sentence structure. Little things like indentation make a big
difference to readability.  It took a few weeks, but the quality of
their code improved considerably (so did mine!)

Hadley

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Mark Daniel Ward<mdw at purdue.edu> wrote:
> Dear Graham,
>   Actually, I love to communicate with the students by email, but I find it
> a nightmare when they email me any code!  Sometimes a 1-minute verbal
> explanation will take several paragraphs to clarify by email.
>   I try to be available almost all of the time in my office, so that they
> can drop by with occasional questions, even outside of office hours.  I also
> use a once-per-week lab session to answer questions, and I've noticed that
> the students talk to each other during such labs..... and they frequently
> answer each other's questions, which is a blessing.
> Mark
>
>
>
> Graham Smith wrote:
>>
>> 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
>>
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