[R-sig-teaching] introducing R to high school students

[Christopher W Ryan]

After some interesting discussions on r-help list, the suggestion was
made that I could also probably gain some useful insights on this
teaching listserve, a resource that I didn't know about previously.

I participate peripherally on a listserve for middle- and high-school
science teachers. Sometimes questions about graphing or data analysis
come up. I never miss an opportunity to advocate for R. However, the
teachers are often skeptical that the students would be able to issue
commands or write a little code; they think it would be too difficult.
Perhaps this stems from the Microsoft- and spreadsheet-centered,
pointy-clicky culture prevalent in most US public schools. Then again,
I have little experience teaching this age group, besides my own kids
and my Science Olympiad team, so I respect their concerns.

Now I have to put my money where my mouth is. I've offered to visit a
high school and introduce R to some fairly advanced students
participating in a longitudinal 3-year science research class.  To be
clear, they are already, for good or for ill, doing data analysis and
graphics for their projects using software.  Mostly they are using
Excel and SPSS.  My goal would be to introduce them to R as another
(and better) tool for what they are currently doing. I would have to
work hard to keep it at a very introductory level, but I don't see why
plot(force, acceleration) should be any more conceptually difficult
for high schoolers than clicking through a whole series of dialog
boxes. The latter merely has the advantage of familiarity. But I can't
help but wonder whether it would be better to give kids good
scientific tools upfront, rather than have them spend many
impressionable years using sub-optimal tools and then in graduate
school try to entice them to switch.

They all will have datasets of their own.  I imagine they will mostly
be single, "rectangular" datasets, ie  data frames.

I tentatively anticipate a lot of graphics, of course, which I'm
hoping they would find pretty cool and useful. I'd also like to
introduce the concept of an object, just to the level of "there are
different kinds, here's what some of the kinds are called, there's
stuff inside them, and you can explore them with str(), head(),
tail(), class()" and the like. Some simple descriptive statistics.
They are already doing t-tests, Chi-squared tests, and linear
regression (again, for good or for ill.)  I don't know whether I'd
have time to get to those topics in R, probably not.

There was a diversity of opinions on R-help about how to do this, and
especially, whether to do it at all.

Has anyone done anything with R in high schools?

Thanks.

--Chris Ryan
SUNY Upstate Medical University
Binghamton Clinical Campus