[R-sig-teaching] [dr.of.chaos maybe from gmail.com: R book for teaching math & science in high school]

[User Hayden]

Thanks for reminding me of this book.  I especially appreciate the
fact that it does not assume you have loaded innumerable libraries.  I
have found that just installing R can be a challenge for many
students, and adding libraries even more so.  First, it requires a
persistent Internet connection, whereas base R can be installed from a
thumb drive or optical disk.  Then there is dependency hell, from
which the R developers try to shield us, not always successfully.  I
can remember trying to install a package that makes R more friendly for
beginners.  It had a long list of dependencies, each with its own
dependencies.  I think there were 147 in all.  Of course, one failed
to load, and so the original package could not be installed.  I
thought a good homework problem would be to determine what the
probability of one package loading would have to be in order for the
probability of 147 loading to be > 50%.    

This book would be a natural for the newish AP Computer Science
Principles course.

https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-computer-science-principles/about

It's obviously relevant to AP Statistics, though teachers there are
wedded to graphing calculators, which is encouraged by same being
"expected" on the official exam.  However, a few AP Stats. teachers do
use R, and I have taken the liberty of quoting this message in the AP
Statistics online community.  FWIW though I think the review by
Matloff will offend that audience.  While I share his views on the
weaknesses of AP Statistics, those weaknesses are shared by a great
many college intro. stats. courses.  In addition, citing the fact that
R is free and graphing calculators cost $100 or so, shows lack of
appreciation of the situation on the ground in many high schools.
While R itself is free, you have to have a computer to run it on and a
readily accessible lab where students can access said computers. Those
are NOT free.  Students also have access to their calculators at home,
which may not be the case for R.  

----- Forwarded message from Brian Dennis
<dr.of.chaos using gmail.com> -----

Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2020 10:16:19 -0800
From: Brian Dennis <dr.of.chaos using gmail.com>
To: r-sig-teaching using r-project.org
Subject: [R-sig-teaching] R book for teaching math & science in high school

Here is a book that introduces R programming for use in high school or
college math and science courses:

https://www.crcpress.com/The-R-Student-Companion/Dennis/p/book/9781439875407

The book is written for absolute beginners in programming concepts and is
one of the most elementary books about R available.  The focus of the book
is not statistics per se but rather scientific graphing, calculation,
modeling, and simulation.  Collected reviews of the book can be found here:

https://webpages.uidaho.edu/~brian/reviews_of_RSC.pdf

The topics are very vanilla R, no RStudio, no ggplot, no dplyr, etc.  The
choice of topics was deliberate so as not to overwhelm students.  The math
level is high school algebra.  The scientific examples treated are quite
real and engaging.

With the move in education toward trying to teach "coding" in schools, one
might ask why not use Python, Java, C+, etc.  The answer is clear:
students can do more cool stuff with R with much less code and computer
science overhead.  As well, the supporting online instructional
environment, with zillions of websites, tutorials, and videos, is hard to
beat.  For future STEM workers, R is the ideal gateway drug!

I have even taught graphing and calculating in R to elementary school
students.  They are eager and enthusiastic and take to it as fast as the
older students.

Readin', Ritin', Rithmetic, and R!

Brian Dennis, Professor
University of Idaho USA

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