I just used (a modified version of) the Master the Tidyverse instructor materials to demo a workshop I'm teaching next week at the local Geoscience Society conference, and thought I'd share some of the comments from the test participants, in the off chance they're useful.
I'm teaching to a crowd of mostly beginners that are 4th year geology/environmental science students, and I only have 4 hours, so I opted to do the Data Visualization and Data Transformation modules. Because I wanted to be able to direct folks to the really good materials that already exist, I switched out the mpg
dataset for a geology-specific one (I included the extra dataset in an R package that I pre-installed in an RStudio Cloud project). Modifying the slides took a very long time (6 ish hours), and the jury is out on whether or not it was worth it. My test cohort of 6 geoscience students had some really helpful feedback:
- RStudio Cloud was a huge hit. No installation problems, and no explanation about having to install a github package to get the geology-specific dataset.
- Having the exercises pre-loaded in an R Notebook was really easy, and nobody had trouble figuring out how to run R code
- The structures of both lessons are very effective, and the slides are really helpful (and very pretty).
- The
babynames
dataset was a huge hit. There was a lot of exploration of the dataset outside of the "Your Turn" bits...people looking up their cat's name, etc.
Also a few constructive critisisms from the test group:
- The beeping on the timers was very unpopular ("I feel like a failure when the timer starts beeping and I don't have it yet"). Turning the volume off seemed to fix that problem.
- The beginner crowd needed hints to get through some of the examples. I haven't decided whether it's best to add the hints as animations on the "Your Turn" slides or add prompting text on the exercises Rmd?
- Perhaps it was because I didn't use the
mpg
dataset, but the participants found the ggplot2 cheatsheet "geometries" section hard to use. I'm thinking of making a modified version but I'm not sure if a modifiable file exists?
- Taking a trip to the back of the room to make sure everybody has the Your Turns completed is easy to forget to do but is super important. The red/green post-it-note method probably could have worked but 4 hours might be too short for folks to get used to it?
I'm planning to send a link to the four RStudio Cloud primers that correspond to the lessons we did in about a week (just like Garret did for us advertising this thread).