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

[Ramon Diaz-Uriarte]

Dear Chris,

Thanks a lot for the detailed report, which I'll keep for reference, and
forward to a few colleagues. 

Just a question/request, for those of us from other countries: what were
the ages of the kids? (grades 10-12 does not mean a lot to me, though,
yes, I could google for it).


Best,


R.



On Tue, 01 Jan 2013 02:09:24 -0500,"Christopher W. Ryan" <cryan at binghamton.edu> wrote:
> Some of you may recall that a few months ago I solicited advice and
> opinions on both R-help and R-sig-teaching about an "introduction to R"
> workshop I intended to present to a class of high school students
> enrolled in a 3-year longitudinal science research class.  Well, I did
> it on 8 October, and thought I'd give some follow-up as to how it went,
> in case anyone was interested.

> The class consisted of about 20 kids, grades 10-12. Each was at a
> computer with R installed. It wasn't clear that the students would be
> able to install packages, given the school's network setup, so I
> confined my plans to base R. We ran for 5 hours, with about a 40-minute
> break for lunch. Their science teacher was present for the entire time,
> and the school's IT person attended about half of it.  They were both
> very helpful, both in preparation and in execution.

> 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.)

> I had my "lesson plan" all laid out in an org-mode file, from which I
> typed code into an R console projected on the screen. The students
> followed my steps initially, and then broadened out to some
> experimentation as the day went on. A couple students were quite skilled
> at working ahead, while others struggled a bit, but everyone was
> eventually able to get the desired results.  They were generally very
> engaged, interactive, and enthusiastic. No one left, except for the odd
> music lesson here and there.  Overall, we had a lot of fun.

> I tried to go pretty slowly. I prepared much more that we had time to
> cover. I emphasized graphics. I did not get into inferential statistics
> or hypothesis testing at all, despite their eagerness to "do a t-test"
> and such. Maybe that will come at a future session, if we do one.

> 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!)

> --Chris Ryan
> SUNY Upstate Medical University
> Binghamton Clinical Campus

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-- 
Ramon Diaz-Uriarte
Department of Biochemistry
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid	
Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas “Alberto Sols” (UAM-CSIC)
Madrid
Spain



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