Hi, I am teaching a one month class in applied statistics and want to bring my students up to speed in R without devoting much/any lecture time to R instruction. I think that the best way to do this is to provide them with a lot of R questions for homework. These questions would be numerous (there is a lot of material to cover), go from very simple to somewhat complex, and focus on all the commands and options that will be useful in applied work. Here are some of my initial questions: ------------------------ Q: Load the data from the cars data frame into the local workspace. A: data(cars) Q: Find information about the cars data frame. A: help(cars) Q: Calculate the dimensions of the data frame. A: dim(cars) Q: What are the names of the variables? A: names(cars) ------------------------ Needless to say, the questions will become more complex, including the writing of simple functions. I also want to provide answers to all the questions that, in theory, could be used in an automated fashion to check the students work. My current plan is to load these questions (somehow) into the quiz module in Moodle (http://moodle.org/). Ideally, I would like this system to be usable by very large classes and even in the context of distance learning. Student goes to a web page, logs in and is presented with a page of questions (or a single question). She figures out the answer in her R session and pastes in the command (or result) into the answer slot on the webpage and pushes a button (or does it for ten questions first). The server then determines which questions she got right and which she got wrong. It might then provide clues to the ones that she has wrong. Once she is done, the professor gets a list of her results (how many right, how many wrong, how many required more than one try and so on). For now, I am not building that system. (Has anyone already done so?) Instead, I am just creating the collection of R questions/answers that might go into such a system. I am aiming for around 1,000 questions. So: Does anyone know of open sourced collections of R questions like this which I might use? Thanks, Dave Kane Adjunct Instructor, Williams College
hadley wickham
2009-Dec-11 18:02 UTC
[R] Sources for open sourced homework questions for R?
Hi Dave, I have a few drills available from http://had.co.nz/stat405 - see the right hand column, about half way down. They seem similar in spirit to what you're thinking of. You might want to look at the "Little Schemer" for a similar approach with a different programming language. However, I'm not sure how pedagogically useful this approach is. If you break things down too finely, you don't teach the problem solving skills necessary to attack a new problem. Students will try and solve the problems as rapidly, using as little of their brain as possible. I also feel like these small problem fail to invoke any intellectually curiosity - why the heck should I care that mtcars has 32 observations and 11 rows? I'd suggest starting with a big problem that's of interest to the students - how do we detect spam? What determines the price of a used car on ebay? Do soap operas influence baby name trends? Are my facebook friends representative of the university as a whole? Then talk about how you might attack the problem in general, before getting to the concrete tools you'd use in R. Hadley On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 10:48 AM, David Kane <dave at kanecap.com> wrote:> Hi, > > I am teaching a one month class in applied statistics and want to > bring my students up to speed in R without devoting much/any lecture > time to R instruction. I think that the best way to do this is to > provide them with a lot of R questions for homework. These questions > would be numerous (there is a lot of material to cover), go from very > simple to somewhat complex, and focus on all the commands and options > that will be useful in applied work. Here are some of my initial > questions: > > ------------------------ > Q: Load the data from the cars data frame into the local workspace. > A: data(cars) > > Q: Find information about the cars data frame. > A: help(cars) > > Q: Calculate the dimensions of the data frame. > A: dim(cars) > > Q: What are the names of the variables? > A: names(cars) > ------------------------ > > Needless to say, the questions will become more complex, including the > writing of simple functions. I also want to provide answers to all the > questions that, in theory, could be used in an automated fashion to > check the students work. My current plan is to load these questions > (somehow) into the quiz module in Moodle (http://moodle.org/). > > Ideally, I would like this system to be usable by very large classes > and even in the context of distance learning. Student goes to a web > page, logs in and is presented with a page of questions (or a single > question). She figures out the answer in her R session and pastes in > the command (or result) into the answer slot on the webpage and pushes > a button (or does it for ten questions first). The server then > determines which questions she got right and which she got wrong. It > might then provide clues to the ones that she has wrong. Once she is > done, the professor gets a list of her results (how many right, how > many wrong, how many required more than one try and so on). > > For now, I am not building that system. (Has anyone already done so?) > Instead, I am just creating the collection of R questions/answers that > might go into such a system. I am aiming for around 1,000 questions. > So: Does anyone know of open sourced collections of R questions like > this which I might use? > > Thanks, > > Dave Kane > Adjunct Instructor, Williams College > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >-- http://had.co.nz/