This semester I am piloting a new six-week workshop series on the R programming language called BootcampR.
I’ve been teaching R workshops for a few years now and I’ve seen a few things that keep recurring in these. First, I seem to run out of time. Every time. So, the easy fix is to make the workshop a little longer – of course, I want to be respectful of people’s schedules, so I didn’t add much time to the workshops. But expanding from one hour to an hour-and-a-half might help make these workshops a bit more managable.
One thing that does work well is the hands-on component of the workshops. When I co-taught my first R workshop at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute a few years ago with Lincoln, we developed RMarkdown worksheets as a way to interactively work through the language together with the class. I’ve continued to develop these worksheets, and I think overall it works pretty well for getting people hands-on with the language in addition to including additional information and explanation about why they’re doing certain things with the language.
For a while now I’ve been teaching the tidyverse to R novices, but I’m trying something new this year: in the first two workshops, all of the work we’re doing is happening in Base R. In week three, we’ll start learning the tidyverse – and what I’m hoping to achieve here is a strong contrast between Base R Ways™ and Tidyverse Ways™ of doing the same task. My goal here is two-fold: to reiterate that there are multiple ways to do the same task in programming, and to show that there’s a cleaner and easier way of doing the task instead of using Base R. This is the highly opinionated section of the workshop: I remain convinced that the way to work with R is by using tidyverse methods.
Finally, the last thing the workshop series is trying to do is build upon itself. In previous workshops, I’ve had to cram in a lot of information: an intro to R, to RStudio, and to the Tidyverse is a lot to fit into one hour. I’ve now broken out the intro to R material into its own workshop, which means by the time we get to class for the Tidyverse I can spend a lot more time explaining how the methods work and why you’d want to use them.
All of the content I’m creating for the course is released CC-BY, so please feel free to use anything I’m creating. Included for each workshop are readings (to be completed before the workshop, so we’re all coming at this with some prior knowledge), an interactive worksheet, resources for after the workshop to keep practicing or read more explanation, and slides from the lecture portion.
It’s the pilot version of this series and I’ll be assessing how it all went at the end. But so far, it seems to be going smoothly.
