Hello A bit late to the party.. On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 4:47 AM, Christopher W Ryan
<cryan at binghamton.edu> wrote:
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. ?To be clear, they are already, for good or for ill, doing data analysis and graphics for their projects using software. ?Mostly they are using Excel and SPSS. ?My goal would be to introduce them to R as another (and better) tool for what they are currently doing.
Although RExcel was already mentioned, one element conspicuously missing from this discussion was R GUIs. Some have suggested RStudio as a practical IDE to R, and I second that. But there are several other GUIs that may help your students to get a quick grasp of R and its coding conventions. Rcmdr and its plug-ins is the inevitable candidate for teaching basic-statistics. There is also Deducer with its plug-ins and data editor window, but in my opinion it is less robust and useful in teaching R coding than Rcmdr. I also like 'playwith', which allows editing and enhancing various R graphics. Its cousin, 'latticist', is an excellent GUI to lattice that, given a data frame, allows to easily generate a range of graphics. Beware, though, of mixing Rcmdr---tcltk based---and playwith/latticist---mainly GTK based---in the same R session: there is a nasty bug [1] that often crashes your R instance. Regards Liviu [1] https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=14187