Putting Materials Online

All of the materials should be put online the day before the class. There are two sets of materials that should be uploaded, and feel free to contact Spencer with any issues.

Class Materials (minimum requirement)

  1. Request access from Spencer to push to the repository.
  2. Clone the rstats_fall2016 repository onto your local machine.

  3. Checkout the gh-pages branch on your local machine, by opening up a terminal, navigating to the local repository, and running the following line:

    $ git checkout gh-pages

  4. Place a .zip folder with your materials (preferably named “x_description”, where x is your week number and a one word description) into the files folder.
  5. Navigate to the _posts folder and find your week’s .md file.
  6. Edit the heading information so that it is correct.
    • for the materials: section, make sure your file path is correct for the zip file you put in the files/ folder. For example if your .zip file was named x_description.zip, you should change the materials line to be materials: files/x_description.zip
  7. Push your changes (the added .zip file and the edited post)

  8. Check that the materials can be accessed on the front page by clicking the Cheatsheets and Files button

Class Materials (helpful!)

  1. Navigate to your _post file (See number 4 above)
  2. Edit the markdown file to contain a quick introduction to what you will be teaching. See the week 1 example for inspiration.

Helpful tips

We have compiled a list of helpful tips that we have found to be effective while teaching these seminars.

  1. Keep it simple. Many attendees have never used R before, and you should always assume people do not understand how functions work, how to format input, and how to interpret function output.
    • When you offer a new term, function, or variable, make sure to explain it fully right away before proceeding.
  2. If you give an example workflow, make sure to motivate the example, and relate each step back to the overall goal of the example.
  3. You might think you are doing really simple examples, but you aren’t. Make sure that you fully explain each step, and examples always take longer than you expect. Simple examples, thoroughly explained, are better than comprehensive examples cursorly explained.
  4. Using the data preview pane in RStudio is easier to show data frame structure then the head() or str() functions.