Requirements and Set Up

Computer Resources

Students will need to have R and R studio on their computers, or access to computers with this software.


Timeline

Introductions ( 0 - 5 minutes)

Brief introduction to the R including its history and relationship to other packages. Also describe what R is and what it is good for. Workshop outline and goals.

This part is in the slides. Gives attendees time to settle and allows for stragglers.


A Tour of R Studio ( 5 - 10 minutes)

R Studio provides an easy way to interact with R. R is a command line and scripted tool and R Studio doesn’t change that. It does make it much easier to see what is going on though. This unit will give you a quick introduction to the main features of R Studio so we can get moving on learning R next.

  • Learn the main view panels in R Studio

The Console and R Studio ( 10 - 20 minutes)

Working with a command line based program can be challenging for some. This unit will get you more comfortable using the R console and introduce some ideas for building productive workflows and reproducible scripts.

  • Learn how to enter commands into the console.
  • Build scripts using the History
  • Explore variables using Environment

Data Types and Structures ( 20 - 40 minutes)

Learning any programming language requires learning the basic data types and data structures it provides. This unit describes these and introduces a few ways to explore and interact with them.

  • Become familiar with different variable types
  • Learn how to explore a variable using environment

In live sessions, it may be best to skip the details of scalars (num, long, integer logical and complex) if time is an issue.


First Analysis (T Test) ( 40 - 55 minutes)
  • Learn about sample data sets
  • Perform a simple analysis
  • Become familiar with significance values

First Visualization ( 55 - 70 minutes)
  • Create a simple box plot.
  • Create a bar chart.
  • Learn some of the many options for visualizations.
  • Discuss some basic principles of visualizations.

Importing and Exporting Data ( 70 - 75 minutes)
  • Import CSV
  • Import Excel
  • Discuss other possibilities.

R Packages ( 75 - 80 minutes)
  • Understand what packages are
  • Installing and loading packages
  • Know what CRAN is
  • Learn about installing from GitHub

This would be good to skip or just touch on briefly if time is short.


A Visualization with GGPlot2 ( 80 - 100 minutes)
  • Use ggplot2 to do a visualization.
  • Building up a visualization
  • Why is it “better”?

Getting Help ( 100 - 110 minutes)
  • Using the help function.
  • Standard documentation in R
  • Getting help on the web
  • Some good resources

Functions ( 110 - 125 minutes)
  • Learn what a function is
  • Be able to use functions
  • Getting help with functions and R
  • Writing a function