purpose of list
Hadley /Mark
Mark Daniel Ward wrote:
I'll follow-up on Hadley's comment by noting that I always post the complete R transcript of our class session, so that the students can download it and use it. ?I also add lots and lots of comments to the file (after class is over), so that they can remember what we did in class. ?They seem to like this feature of my class.
hadley wickham wrote:
This matches my experience in a course which I taught both Excel and R. ?Most students preferred R because it was much harder to follow what I was doing in the GUI - where exactly was I clicking, was it a right or left click, etc. ?With R you see everything I type and it's very easier to reproduce. ?It's also much faster and easier to produce a page of commented R code that allows students to reproduce all the important steps, compared to recording a screencast to show the steps in Excel.
I'm glad to see my experience isn't unique. I find the ability to email me a bit of code that isn't working a fanatastic feature for me. It has always been a nightmare trying to diagnose via email what some one is doing wrong with Minitab/Excel. Graham