Student projects

[hturner]

Suggested by @mine-cetinkaya-rundel at last meeting: design student projects based on R Dev Guide.

Maybe overlaps with #11 ?

[mine-cetinkaya-rundel]

Do folks have ideas for what would be most useful as a project? I imagine reviewing the dev guide and making contributions would be part of it. But beyond that, any ideas?

[gmbecker]

For clarity before we get into the details on this, by student projects, do we mean self-contained mini-lessons which are intended for learning that many students can do independently and with no ultimate impact beyond their increased skills, or do we mean independent study they are, e.g., working with someone more knowledgable to apply the lessons of how to, e.g., confirm bugs in practice, by actually interacting with bugzilla?

I think both are possible but they would look very very different; the former must involve no interaction with bugzilla, for example (see horror stories about submission to CRAN as a class assignment), while the latter may be of limited use without it. @hturner @mine-cetinkaya-rundel

[mine-cetinkaya-rundel]

@gmbecker I was thinking more of an independent study than a class. The goal isn't necessarily to submit big fixes (though that could potentially be an outcome) but to get more people interacting with the documentation @SaranjeetKaur developed, follow the instructions, provide feedback, etc.

[hturner]

I think this could tie in with the ideas in

• https://github.com/forwards/rcontribution/issues/11

i.e. students could be assigned the "monthly challenge"?

[mine-cetinkaya-rundel]

That sounds like a good idea, and might make it easier for multiple profs to run such a project since they won't actually have to come up with the "assignments"