[R-sig-teaching] purpose of list

[Robert W. Hayden]

Forwarded message:
> From: hadley wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com>
> >
> > 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 =A02nd 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.

This matches my experience with the command line vs. a GUI.  However,
I used Minitab!-)  Is the CLI gone in Version 15?  I used it through
14.  It seems to be deprecated by Minitab, Inc., though.  Around
Version 13 they abolished inline comments and also around that time
they started shipping Minitab with the command line turned off as
default, but last I knew you could turn it on again.  I vaguely recall
you might also have had to install command line help as a separate
step (or installation option).  Certainly for an intro. stats. course
the Minitab CLI seems much more intuitive than the R CLI.  The data are in
columns C1, C2, etc.  Sample commands:

boxplot C1
histogram C2
describe C3 
regress data in C3 on 1 independent variable in C2

The last is an example of inline commenting.  In Version 13 it would
have to be

regress C3 1 C2

------->  First-time AP Stats. teacher?  Help is on the way! See

 http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Stat_Inst/Stats2007/Bob%20Hayden/Relief.html
	    
  Robert W. Hayden in the old library at  212 Main Street (P. O. Box 450)
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