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

[Bob]

I know one high school teacher who used R in her AP Statistics
class.  I just dropped her a note to see if she is willing to provide
any links to her work or an email address.  I have also used R as one
software option in online courses over the past few years, and plan to
use it a bit next summer in a workshop for high school AP Statistics
teachers. 

Installation and data file format can grind a demo to a halt in no
time.  I suggest you run stuff on your own machine or use something
like RWEB (Google it).  To use student data maybe you can either send
them info on the file format you need or even better ask them to
submit data beforehand with documentation so you can see if you can
find anything you can use.  My experience is that anyting you ask a
host to get working in advance will not work the day of the demo;-(

R can do some spectacular graphics -- certainly compared to Excel!
Even a simple histogram, which also has the advantage the R is much
EASIER than Excel for such basic graphics.  

If I knew the students had access to PCs I would download the latest R
and burn it to CDs to hand out.  I would not spend demo time on
installation but they could all take this home to play with.
Actually, I would probably give out a live Linux Cd with R
preinstalled.  (Often the problem is that the teachers cannot figure
out R but the students can, which creates problems for teachers who
need to give the appearance of having all the answers.)  If they use
Macs I would give up;-)

It is much easier to modify code than to write it from scratch.  You
might do a simple lm(y~x) with a dataset with several variables and
then try lm(z~x) or lm(y~z). Should be easy in RWEB.  

My experience with learning R is that those who teach it presnt things
that are way too complicate4d for beginners. The goal is to anlyze
data, not to show of how much you know about R, or every feature it
has.  Beginners will not see the need for or usefulness of objects
until they have gained some experience. The goal should be to maximize
the analysis of data and minimize time spent on the peculiarities of
R.  You are welcome to offer students this link to materials that try
to do this.

   http://statland.org/Software_Help/R/Rhome.htm

 

Forwarded message:
> From: Christopher W Ryan <cryan at binghamton.edu>
> 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
> 
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> 
> 

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