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 their 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 and expertise.
I don't know yet what software they generally use, but I suspect MS Excel and SPSS. 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. I anticipate keeping things very simple: --objects and the fact that there is stuff inside them. str(), head(), tail() --how to get data into R --dataframes, as I imagine they will mostly be using single, "rectangular" datasets --a lot of graphics (I can't imagine that plot(force, acceleration) is beyond a high-schooler's capability.) --simple descriptive statistics --maybe t-tests, chi-square tests, and simple linear regression. Alas, probably more than we would have time to cover. Has anyone done anything with R in high schools? Thanks. --Chris Ryan SUNY Upstate Medical University Binghamton Clinical Campus ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
