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From: hadley wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com>
In all three years, unprompted by me, I have had between five and seven students come to me after the R sessions asking why we hadn't used R in first year. They find the command line more direct and immediate than Mintab, which, it seems, they had found confusing. This year I asked the whole =A02nd year class to vote on whether they would have preferred R to Mintab in 1st year. Everyone voted for R.
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.
This matches my experience with the command line vs. a GUI. However, I used Minitab!-) Is the CLI gone in Version 15? I used it through 14. It seems to be deprecated by Minitab, Inc., though. Around Version 13 they abolished inline comments and also around that time they started shipping Minitab with the command line turned off as default, but last I knew you could turn it on again. I vaguely recall you might also have had to install command line help as a separate step (or installation option). Certainly for an intro. stats. course the Minitab CLI seems much more intuitive than the R CLI. The data are in columns C1, C2, etc. Sample commands: boxplot C1 histogram C2 describe C3 regress data in C3 on 1 independent variable in C2 The last is an example of inline commenting. In Version 13 it would have to be regress C3 1 C2 -------> First-time AP Stats. teacher? Help is on the way! See http://courses.ncssm.edu/math/Stat_Inst/Stats2007/Bob%20Hayden/Relief.html Robert W. Hayden in the old library at 212 Main Street (P. O. Box 450) North Troy, VT 05859 phone (802) 988-2587 web site http://statland.org/ email bob statland.org (add your own "@" and save me some spam)