purpose of list

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.
Mark



hadley wickham wrote:

As a casual observation I am now in my third year of teaching basic
statistics to biology/ecology students with a mix of Minitab and R.
Outside the formal teaching, I have used R with selected students for
6 or 7 years (students who want to work at home, students with
Macs/Linux at home, and my personal dissertation students).

?In the first year I use Minitab and in the second year I use R.
Classes are around 30 students in first year and 20 in second year.

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 ?2nd 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.

Hadley