DataCamp talks @user2015aalborg

The team behind DataCamp is getting ready for its third useR! attendance in as many years. This year we will contribute two talks. One on teaching R in class, and another on our testwhat package.

Talk One: Teaching R in (an Online) Class

Today, over 145,000 people have started a course on DataCamp. In this talk we will present some of our latest tools that we developed to make the learning experience even better.The headliner within our presentation is a whole new DataCamp feature that will allow you to create, participate and manage professional teams and groups of students that are taking courses at DataCamp. This new feature comes with a dashboard that will allow you to get detailed insight into student and employee performance within and across courses. An instructor, professor or team manager can use the tool both in a fully online setting or in a blended learning environment, and thanks to the underlying automation less time needs to be spent on tasks such as student grading.Furthermore, we will provide a brief intro on how to create courses on DataCamp for both our traditional interface and our new swirl interface. Finally, we will share some key insights based on analyzing the data students learning R.

Talk Two: Taking testing to another level with testwhat

The architecture of the testthat R package (the de facto standard for writing unit tests for R packages) is very generic and suits itself to extension and adaptation. At DataCamp we adapted the testthat package to be used on the R backend of our interactive learning platform. By defining a new type of reporter and adding user-friendly test functions that are designed specifically for testing the correctness of a student’s submission, the testwhat package now exists as a wrapper around testthat.The talk intends to give a brief overview of testthat and its internals, followed by a more detailed discussion about testwhat and the elegant adaptations that have been made to leverage testthat’s functionality for an entirely different application.See you soon!