[R] Teaching R in 40 minutes. What should be included?

[Thomas Schönhoff]

Hello,

Am Freitag, 25. Februar 2005 22:37 schrieb Dr Carbon:
> If _you_ were asked to give a 40 minute dog and pony show about R
> for a group of scientists ranging from physicists to geographers
> what would you put in? These people want to know what R can do.
>
> I'm thinking about something like:
>
> A. Overview
> B. data structures
> C. arithmetic and manipulation
> D. reading data
> E. linear models using glm
> F. graphics
> G. programming
> H. other tricks like rpart or time series analysis?

If your audience is well known I would be inclined to target some 
(simple) examples derived from physics and geography to demonstrate 
basic ideas of working with R, similar like the ones listed above.

Well, 40 minutes are not too long, so I recommend to simplify your 
presentation as much as you can. You want teach them R in 40 minutes 
but rather tend to confuse them if you don't shorten your plan a bit.
I.E. teaching programming in R in a few minutes for scientists who are 
not at all acustomed to programming  is much overhead, I think.
Well, it's up to your estimation on what is expected to follow your 
presentation. If you are sure that most of them know enough 
programming to unterstand the basic concepts in R-programming, 
everything will be fine!
If not, I'd recommend  to concentrate on basic operations (data 
structures, arithmetic and manipulation, import/export data and some 
often used default statistical procedures demonstrating common tasks 
(is time series analysis important in physics or geography, I don't 
know??), including some remarks on diffenrences to widespread 
statistical packages like SPSS or SAS, maybe LispStat.
Finally there shouuld be some extended view of available ressources 
(manuals, FAQ, community) as a starter to learn, use and program R by 
themselves.
I think this would do for a 40 minutes presentation without taking the 
risk to deter people due to overcomplexity.

regards
Thomas