The Open Teach-R Project Workshop: creating fun R courses

mozfest-bot commented 7 years ago

[ UUID ] a2fd9a0e-d5c3-4d1a-a3dd-ec8edcf3f28a

[ Session Name ] The Open Teach-R Project Workshop: creating fun R courses [ Primary Space ] Open Innovation

[ Submitter's Name ] Marcos Vital [ Submitter's Affiliated Organisation ] Universidade Federal de Alagoas, UFAL, Brazil [ Submitter's Github ] @marcosvital

What will happen in your session?

The Open Teach-R Project (born during Mozilla's Open Leadership training) mission is to build, gather and organize courseware for anyone willing to offer R courses. During this workshop I want to share and learn from experiences about teaching R, and collaboratively build a new “fun intro to R course”. The idea is to build an introductory course that is friendly and efficient in teaching R for those without computer science background and, at the same time, is fun, attractive and filled with unorthodox examples. We will use unexpected data-sets drawn from pop culture, music, literature and so on, balancing real R usage with light-hearted data in a way that will help learning R to be an attractive activity.

What is the goal or outcome of your session?

As an outcome we should get a complete course: slides, scripts, guides, data and everything that will help an instructor to use and/or modify the material to teach an R course. The goal is to facilitate the activities of those interested in teaching R and spreading open source and open research practices among students. In my experience, dealing mostly with Biological Sciences students in Brazil, most students without programming skills believe that R is a very difficult tool to master, and are usually scared of it. Combining a good teaching planning with unusual and fun examples can help overcome this.

If your session requires additional materials or electronic equipment, please outline your needs.

A projector and a whiteboard will do the job.

Time needed

All weekend, as an installation, exhibit or drop-in session

KirstieJane commented 7 years ago

[ Facilitator 1 Name ] Marcos Vital [ Facilitator 1 Github ] @marcosvital [ Facilitator 1 Twitter ] @marcosvcvital

Requirements

marcosvital commented 7 years ago

Hi, there, everyone!

Attendance confirmed and stipend awarded, this is truly amazing! :D And as I'm counting down the days to MozFest, I would like to share what I am expecting from this session.

What is this session about: The main idea is to collaboratively build material (like slides, scripts, guides, etc) for a R course. But not any course: a friendly and fun course, that can help making people new to R to feel stimulated to learn and use it. This session is a "spin-off" of the Open Teach-R Project, and more details about it can be found here: https://github.com/marcosvital/teach-R-project

How do I expect people to participate: This session can work either with a group of people working together for a long period of time (as in a workshop) or with people coming and making any sort of contributions, form small to large, as they move on to see and participate other sessions.

Is this appropriated for the Gallery? This is my first MozFest, so I still have no idea about how things are going to happen there.

Who can participate: Anyone interested in R, from experienced to new users! Everyone is welcome to take a look, and any kind contributions will be welcomed. :)

What do I need: All I'll need is my own computer and, depending on the size of the space where this session will take place, a whiteboard and a projector (and I believe that the projector could be replaced with a large computer monitor if we are using a small space).

KirstieJane commented 7 years ago

This is great @marcosvital!

We'll send more information about gallery sessions soon (I know it's a little confusing!)

auremoser commented 7 years ago

Thanks @marcosvital ! We could definitely support an R-clinic in the Gallery space, but I think you might want to limit the time that you're there hosting the session...since it will be a long weekend if you keep the R gallery piece up with you in attendance. And we do want you to enjoy the rest of mozfest too!

Perhaps we can slot you with 2-3 15 min sessions over both days, giving you the opportunity to setup the workshop and answer any questions folks might have about R based on particular topics. We could even create a help desk, or a help table <- read.table 💯 , and you could host 15 minute tutorials in R at certain scheduled times, both days. I'm not sure what makes the most sense to you time-wise. Let me know what you'd prefer to commit to, a slightly longer time on one day or two shorter sessions on both days.

marcosvital commented 7 years ago

Thanks, @auremoser ! I loved the idea of small sessions on both days. You know, I was so committed about this session that I was actually considering spending the whole time there! But I would surely miss being able to see what else is going on in the festival. So thanks for pointing that out. ;)

OK, so let's proceed with the ideia of some sessions on both days. I can think about three kinds of sessions, and would love to hear what you think about it and how much time we should take for each one of them:

a workshop-like session with the original ideia, that is, to build fun material for teaching R. This would probably work as a longer session (30 min, maybe?), with people willing to contribute: we would brainstorm some ideias and start to build courseware together, and everyone would be invited to continue later with online contributions as part of the Teach-R project.
a demo-like session about the Teach-R project, showing material we built so far and discussing ideias ad experiences about teaching R. This could work fine as small, maybe 15 min sessions.
finally, we could have a tutorial-like session for people new to R! This was not in my original proposal, but I would love to do it. And in the end, this would be tied to the whole project, as I would use material from the project to teach! I guess this could work out as 20 - 30 min sessions.

So, right now I would say that I could totally host one of the above sessions each day. But I'm completely open for ideias, so let me hear what you think of it.

KirstieJane commented 7 years ago

@marcwalsh - changed session format. I've updated the end of the description in the guidebook.

auremoser commented 7 years ago

Hey @marcosvital ! Apologies for my delayed reply on this, we've been swamped with scheduling arrangements. But this looks good, we switched your session format to a learning forum, because that fits better for your workshop/tutorial style session. So, per the schedule that Kirstie sent out and the one that will go live in our "guidebook" / schedule, you're all set to present 16:30-17:30 on Sunday and I'm excited to recruit folk to attend your session 🍰 :)

marcosvital commented 7 years ago

Hi, @auremoser ! Thanks! No worries about the delayed reply, I was in a hurry with another event, and wouldn't be able to answer anyway... ;)

I'm still catching up with the last messages in my email about MozFest, and hope to read everything today. Learning forum sounds great for me! :D

I'll let you know soon if I have any questions.

MozillaFoundation / mozfest-program-2017