Prerequisites

Participants must be able to use a laptop/computer capable of running recent RStudio. See below for the RStudio Installation section.

Teachers

What we teach

R is an open-source, free environment/language for statistical computing and graphics. It provides a large repository of statistical analysis methods.

The goal of the course is to teach students how the R language, extended by tidyverse package, can be used to build a report with a simple statistical analysis of data provided in a table. The course assumes no prior programming knowledge.

NOTE: This is not a statistics course! We do not teach statistics; we teach how to write simple programs in the R language. Elementary statistics knowledge is necessary to understand examples.

After the course you will:

We will cover the following topics:

All sessions: practicing

The course is divided in half-day sessions. Each session is split into a few small topics and each topic is introduced as follows:

  • A short lecture for introduction/demonstration.
  • A self-study practice session (with primary exercises end extra exercises) with chat interactions.

The students are asked to type on their keyboards the commands being presented and observe effects (avoid copy-paste; own typing is important in order to learn how to respond to mistakes/errors).

The last session: self study assignment

A self study assignment (SSA) will be offered during the last session. A set of tasks will be provided to be solved individually without and help from others. At the end there will be a general discussion.

The overall SSA goal is to prepare an R Markdown document reporting an analysis of a dataset. You will be asked to carry out the following steps:

  • Create an RStudio project, knit an R Markdown document.
  • Read a provided table.
  • Show some filtered/summarized content of the table.
  • Produce some plots of the data.

Installation

Before the course prepare your computer.
NOTE: Resolving installation problems during the course may be impossible, therefore please follow the steps below a week before the start of the course. In case of failure, please inform the teachers. In some situations intervention of the administrator of your computer might be necessary.

Some additional packages are needed for the course. During the course the participants will learn how to install packages but this process occasionally fails (because e.g.: additional steps are needed in a particular operating system, or there is lack of permissions to access some system directories, or other software is too old, …).

During the course applications in multiple windows will be used. For better experience we advice a setup with two monitors (e.g. laptop and an external monitor).


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