This last weekend I helped Danny Kaplan and Kathryn Kozak (Coconino Community College) put on a StatPREP workshop. We were also joined by Amelia McNamara (Smith College) and Joe Roith (St. Catherine’s University). The idea behind StatPREP is to work directly with college-level instructors, through online and in community-based workshops, to develop the understanding and skills needed to work and teach with modern data.

Danny Kaplan ponders at #StatPREP

One of the most interesting aspects of these workshops were the tutorials and exercises that the participants worked on. These utilized the R package learnr. This package allows people to create interactive tutorials via RMarkdown. These tutorials can incorporate code chunks that run directly in the browser (when the tutorial is hosted on an appropriate server), and Shiny apps. They can also include exercises/quiz questions as well.

An example of a code chunk from the learnr package.

Within these tutorials, participants were introduced to data wrangling (via dplyr), data visualization (via ggfomula), and data summarization and simulation-based inference (via functions from Project Mosaic). You can see and try some of the tutorials from the workshop here. Participants, in breakout groups, also envisioned a tutorial, and with the help of the workshop presenters, turned that into the skeleton for a tutorial (some things we got working and others are just outlines…we only had a couple hours).

You can read more about the StatPREP workshops and opportunities here.