hoytpr
commented
5 years ago @ErinBecker I'm not sure what happened to this, seems like nothing really happened. But it's important to keep students engaged from the beginning. EDIT: We just taught this lesson and you are correct. Maybe present one example of bad data (separating the species from the sex) then jump into the exercise as a live demonstration; while asking questions of the audience. We should itemize the order we approach the different problems (Maybe challenge the students with the 2014 data?). Otherwise the students lack direction because “All the mistakes” are presented in a later part of the lesson. The messy spreadsheet opens with the columns for dates in the 2014 tab too narrow, the 2014 fourth plot data might not be visible, the yellow cells in the lesson don’t match the grey calls in the spreadsheet, and the cell sizes in the “dates” tab are too large to see the data (can be fixed by changing row height to 22). These are relevant problems with spreadsheets but we aren’t discussing these problems. In the interest of time, maybe we should fix these issues to speed up the workshop. Also, the example table in “Using multiple tables” is too small to read. Might be better to show less data, or give the spreadsheet as a spreadsheet for learners to open themselves.
Finally, if this spreadsheet is going to be updated to the "Genomics organization-genomics" spreadsheet, this lesson will need a re-write.
This lesson starts with some explanation of tidy data principles and then has learners look at the messy spreadsheet and make a list of problems with the formatting. Since this is the first lesson in the workshop, this leads to a very slot start to the morning. i've found that it's more engaging to give a very brief introduction to the goals of the spreadsheet lesson and then jump straight into the first exercise. The discussion of tidy data principles can then be part of the class discussion about that exercise.