[R-sig-teaching] follow-up on teaching R to high school students

[Robert Baer]

On 1/1/2013 1:09 AM, Christopher W. Ryan wrote:
>                  -- snip --
> I conducted an (utterly arbitrary and unvalidated) online survey among
> the students a couple weeks in advance, to gauge their familiarity with
> what I called "technical computing," i.e. anything beyond commonplace
> word-processing, spreadsheets, web surfing, and social media. The
> questions were:
>
> 1. What operating systems do you know how to work in? Check all that apply.
>     Windows 19
>     Mac OS X 12
>     Linux 2
>     others 0
>
> 2. Do you have a favorite text editor?
>     Yes 5
>     No 7
>     I don't know what a text editor is 7
>
> 3. Do you use a two-pane file manager?
>     Yes 1
>     No 6
>     I don't know what a two-pane file manager is 12
>
> 4. Have you written programs in any computer language?
>     Yes 4
>     No 11
>     I don't know 4
>     (the specific languages cited included Basic, Java, Javascript, Ruby,
>   C++, Python, MS-DOS command prompt batch files.)
Very interesting. You say "science teacher" and not "math teacher".  
Were these advanced students, and what "science" were they taking that 
they had been using SPSS?  Were they doing things with their own data?

> In general, topics we covered included:
>
> vectorized mathematics (what I called "bulk math")
> generating sequences
> (meant to do logical conditions here, but skipped it inadvertantly)
> drawing random samples
> different kinds of objects (we limited ourselves to scalars, vectors,
> dataframes; character, numeric, and factor)
> levels of measurement: nominal, ordinal, interval/ratio
> exploring objects: str(), head(), tail(), class(), summary()
> using in-built data sets provided with R
> general principles of good data entry and storage, and the virtues of
> plain text. Went over read.table (I meant to do more with reading data
> into R, but ran out of time. I sent simple instructions for the foreign
> package and read.spss() to their teacher after the fact, since up until
> now they had been using SPSS a lot, and several of their data sets were
> in that format.)
> graphs: boxplots, scatterplots, stripcharts, scatterplot matrices, and
> coplots (they liked that last one a lot).  Also some graphical
> parameters: type=, main=, sub=, col=, xlim=, ylim=, and pch=
>
> Comments to teacher over the subsequent couple of days included:
> "This should be taught in high school." "I got to see data for the first
> time in a different way." "I had the most fun when I realized I could
> play around with the program." (Of course, any less-than-positive
> comments, the students (or their teacher) may have kept to themselves!)
>
I applaud you for trying this.  Inspires me to think I should check if 
there is a similar desire at the local high school here.  Pretty 
intimidating notion, though, when I think of the initial push-back I get 
from the GUI-raised Masters degree students that I currently work with 
<G>.   I think you had a nice agenda and were quite smart to feature 
graphics.  Probably made their graphing calculators look pre-historic 
(or maybe they are by now ;-)!



Rob