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

[Liviu Andronic]

Hello
A bit late to the party..


On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 4:47 AM, Christopher W Ryan
<cryan at binghamton.edu> wrote:
> 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.
>
Although RExcel was already mentioned, one element conspicuously
missing from this discussion was R GUIs. Some have suggested RStudio
as a practical IDE to R, and I second that. But there are several
other GUIs that may help your students to get a quick grasp of R and
its coding conventions.

Rcmdr and its plug-ins is the inevitable candidate for teaching
basic-statistics. There is also Deducer with its plug-ins and data
editor window, but in my opinion it is less robust and useful in
teaching R coding than Rcmdr. I also like 'playwith', which allows
editing and enhancing various R graphics. Its cousin, 'latticist', is
an excellent GUI to lattice that, given a data frame, allows to easily
generate a range of graphics. Beware, though, of mixing Rcmdr---tcltk
based---and playwith/latticist---mainly GTK based---in the same R
session: there is a nasty bug [1] that often crashes your R instance.

Regards
Liviu

[1] https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=14187