[R-sig-teaching] purpose of list

[Mark Daniel Ward]

I've seen Hadley's rubrics for his assignments.  They are really excellent!
Mark



hadley wickham wrote:
> 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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>>>
>>>       
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>>     
>
>
>
>