Teaching R - In front of the computer?
Dear Roland, I wrote an eight-pages manuscript with basic commands and instructions to use the help system and gave the students series of many small exercises. For further concepts such as matrix computations, index manipulations, coercion, I gave short presentations (15 minutes or so), again followed by series of exercises including some where they had to find out about non-introduced stuff. I was available for help (of course this works with up to 25, but not necessarily with 90 students). It worked quite well even though it's not exactly a fast way to introduce a lot of commands... Christian
On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, John Fox wrote:
Dear Roland, I've taught the use of R to this kind of audience many times. Take a look at <http://socserv.socsci.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Courses/UCLA/index.html> for materials used in such a workshop, and at <http://socserv.socsci.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Teaching-with-R.pdf> for a paper on teaching social statistics with R. As others have suggested, using static slides is not a good idea, and having at least a live display for the presenter is essential. It also helps to have the students sitting at computers and able to try things out for themselves. If this is a workshop devoted to R, I'd strongly recommend this format. On the other hand, if you're teaching R in the context of a more general statistics course, you can cover the basics in a hands-on workshop and then use the LCD projector to introduce new commands, etc., during the course as they're needed. I find that once they've acquired the basics, students are able to work more independently. I hope this helps, John On Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:25:14 +0200 "Rau, Roland" <Rau at demogr.mpg.de> wrote:
Dear R-Users,
given you have been teaching R to students (grad level, mainly social
science background, no previous programming experience, 80% know
SPSS),
what are your experiences concerning the style of teaching? Do you
prefer to stand in front of the class like in "normal" lectures and
you
show them slides? Or do you you explain some concept (for example
things
like mydata[order(var1, var2),]) and show it directly on the computer
via beamer/projector and also the students have to enter it on the
computers in front of them.
Any experiences you can share are highly appreciated.
Thanks,
Roland
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-------------------------------- John Fox Department of Sociology McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/
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*** --- *** Christian Hennig University College London, Department of Statistical Science Gower St., London WC1E 6BT, phone +44 207 679 1698 chrish at stats.ucl.ac.uk, www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucakche