Prepping for Paideia this year, I approached visiting professor Albert Kim about providing a quick one-hour introduction to R. R is the chosen platform for our introductory statistics course and is used by folks across all the sciences (social, physical, natural) across campus. Speaking with faculty and students over the past two years, I regularly hear requests for more R support.
Albert agreed to teach and we put together a three-part course, which was designed to run just over an hour. We started by getting users oriented to the R Studio interface (a graphical front-end for R), conducted some basic analysis on a dataset, and delved into a dataset scraped from OKCupid which garnered significant student interest. Of the nearly twenty people in the room, the majority were students — ranging from first-years to seniors — with two faculty joining us as well.
There are many resources available for learning R on the internet; here are some starters.
- The first in a series of introduction to R youtube videos from the Google Developers team.
- A Very Short Introduction to R by Paul Torfs & Claudia Brauer, via the R project website
- Introducing R to a non-programmer in under an hour, Alyssa Frazee
- A compendium of more resources (internet and print, both) from W. Andrew Barr