> -----Original Message----- > From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On > Behalf > Of Hadley Wickham > Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 10:37 AM > To: Christopher W Ryan > Cc: R-help > Subject: Re: [R] introducing R to high school students > > > 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. > > I think those are good topics to cover, but the order is wrong - start > with graphics. They are immediately useful and you can start with > built in datasets (although I'd recommend finding a package with more > interesting/bigger datasets than the base packages). Once you've > shown them how to use graphics to understand data you can talk more > about how it works - what is a dataframe, how you load data in R, etc. > > That's the path I follow when I teach R (http://stat405.had.co.nz/, > http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/assessment.html), and I find it to be > successful at keeping students motivated enough to work through the > initial frustrations of learning a new language. R is not too > difficult for high-school students to learn, but you need to make sure > you provide them with tools to do things that they're interested in - > finding interesting problems that they _want_ to solve is most of the > battle.
If the students are in a "science research" class, does that mean they have data from their own research that they would want to understand better? I think that would be much more motivating than anything else. "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." [Antoine de St. Exupery] Bill Dunlap Spotfire, TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com > > Hadley > > -- > Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair > Department of Statistics / Rice University > http://had.co.nz/ > > ______________________________________________ > 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. ______________________________________________ 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.
