Baseball with r how to#
Baseball with r series#

Statistics educators think about the best way to communicate statistical inference - why shouldn’t data science educators think about best ways of teaching coding for data science? My Approach in Welcome to R It would be interesting to design an experiment to assess the comparative value of tidyverse and base R functions in learning R. That raises the question - is tidyverse really a good way of learning R? Honestly, I have my doubts. By the way, there are other tidyverse skeptics out there - for example, Norm Matloff and Jasper McChesney - and Matloff is an experienced teacher and writer of the R language.

Base R is hard enough, but tidyverse adds hundreds of new functions to learn. One difficulty in learning any new programming language is the syntax especially when there are many new function names to learn. (They didn’t have a backup plan.) They really didn’t understand vectors and matrices, although those objects are building blocks in R.

Baseball with r how to#

After taking my tidyverse course, they didn’t know how to write a loop or write simple functions and they got frustrated when their tidyverse code didn’t work. Why? I found at BGSU that my data science students who learned tidyverse had gaps in their knowledge of R. The tidyverse collection is embraced by RStudio and many other people as a great way of learning R.īut I don’t plan on using tidyverse in this introduction to R. In fact, I have used the R for Data Science text by Wickham and Grolemund to introduce R for the first data science course at BGSU. I have used tidyverse packages, especially dplyr, in my data science teaching in the past. As described by its main developer Hadley Wickham, tidyverse is an opinionated collection of R packages designed for data science. One popular general approach for learning R is based on the tidyverse suite of R packages. I started coding with S many years ago, I’ve written or cowritten three books that introduce R for different audiences, and so I have done a bit of thinking of how best to introduce R from a pedagogical perspective. That raises the obvious question - how to get started in R? I’ve taught R for many years, first for my graduate courses in statistics and more recently for undergraduate courses in data science.

Baseball with r series#

So I thought it would be helpful to have a series of tutorial posts called “Welcome to R” introducing R and RStudio directed to the person who wants to get started. But I suspect that my posts don’t really help the interested new reader who wishes to learn R. I usually provide some R code which helps some people do their own explorations. I start with a baseball question and try to answer the question using R work and modeling and associated graphical displays. I’ve been writing posts on this site for awhile and you know my style.