I'm making a list of suggestions of things we might possibly change, so that we can make new Issues to address them. The ones that are checked have been agreed to. Some of the others have been discussed, but your opinion might have changed after having run through the course so recently.
[x] Remove dependencies (tibble, ggplot2, cowplot, magrittr), and remove testthat from Imports. Check through the package that they're not being used first.
[ ] Remove docstrings, if we're advocating writing packages then docstrings are only briefly useful in Series 2, and when they're left in they cause roxygen2 to generate a warning.
[ ] Remove findGlobals() from the course or relegate it to console use only. Same as above, if we're advocating writing packages then devtools::check() is far more comprehensive, and can be used to debug a package since provides warnings and errors. Interpreting these warnings and errors, I think, is a useful skill. When not writing a package, if we focus more on debugging skills, they should be able to identify these issues themselves, consciously, rather than having a bit of copied and pasted code that means they don't need to think about it.
[ ] Make an FAQ of common warnings and errors with mini examples. We could perhaps write example code illustrating these warnings and errors and write a debugging practical (to complete prior to Series 2), giving the students a chance to debug the code prior to encountering them in the course.
[ ] Make the tasks in Series 2 a bit clearer and perhaps provide examples of what the plots should look like.
[ ] Rework / remove the exercises that pass functions to run_simple() and run_simulation(), or ask the students to write run_simple() themselves. If you're not familiar with them, they're annoying to debug. By the way, both of these contains findGlobals(), so the missing codetools dependency caused by running findGlobals() in their function files should have been a non-issue if we'd told them that. If we decide to keep these functions, an explanation of how the debug argument is intended to be used might also be useful.
I'm making a list of suggestions of things we might possibly change, so that we can make new Issues to address them. The ones that are checked have been agreed to. Some of the others have been discussed, but your opinion might have changed after having run through the course so recently.