1 Let them eat cake first!
Start teaching R with visualisation.
This means jumping over installation details, which we’ll discuss in cherish day one as well as basics of the R syntax.
The “let them eat cake first” approach, where students first see an example of a complex data visualisation, which they will be able to build by the end of the course you’re teaching, and then slowly work their way through the building blocks (Çetinkaya-Rundel and Ellison 2020).
This approach is also presented in Wang, Rush, and Horton (2017), which advocates for “bringing big ideas into intro stats early and often”.
1.2 Your turn
1.2.1 Do
You have two options for this exercise. Pick one and complete it. Optionally, try the other one as well.
You will use RStudio Cloud for these exercises. Click here to join the RStudio Cloud workspace for this workshop. The video below walks you through getting started with RStudio Cloud.
-
Option 1: Voting patterns of countries in the UN General Assembly
Start the project titled 01a - UN Votes.
In the Files pane (bottom right corner), spot the file called
unvotes.Rmd.Open it and click “Knit”.
-
Then…
- Go back to the file and change your name on top of the document and knit again.
- Change the country names to those you’re interested in. Spelling and capitalization must match how the countries appear in the data, so take a peek at the Appendix to confirm spelling.
- Knit again. Voila, your first data visualization!
-
Option 2: COVID-19 fatality numbers across the globe
Start the project titled 01b - COVID-19.
In the Files pane (bottom right corner), spot the file called
covid.Rmd.Open it and click “Knit”.
-
Then…
Go back to the file and change your name on top of the document and knit again.
Change the country names to those you’re interested in. Spelling and capitalization must match how the countries appear in the data, so take a peek at the Appendix to confirm spelling.
Knit again. Voila, your first data visualization!
1.2.2 Discuss
When you’re done with the exercises, discuss with others in your breakout group how you would adapt such an exercise for your teaching. Which dataset would you use? Don’t worry too much about feasibility (e.g. is such data easily accessible), instead focus on what data/questions audiences you generally teach would be interested in.
1.3 More resources
In addition to the referenced articles, you might enjoy the following resources if you’d like to read / hear / watch more on this topic.
Deeper dive into the pedagody: Let them eat cake (first)!
R package for incremental ggplot2 builds: Flipbooks by Gina Reynolds