[R] Teaching R - In front of the computer?

[Rau, Roland]

Dear all,

thanks for telling me your experiences how you proceed teaching R. I am currently giving a five week course teaching R to 16 graduate-level students consisting of 12 sessions à 1.5 hours. Two weeks have passed during that course and I was just questioning myself whether my "style" of teaching in front of the students with a running R session (+editor) is the best way of teaching. [1]

But thanks to the replies I got here, I believe this is a better approach than teaching in front of the class like in a normal lecture without any "live display" of R.

I especially liked the idea on John Fox Homepage to give code and the students have to debug it. 

Thanks again for all your replies.

Best,
Roland



[1] What I usually do is to describe what we want to do. Occasionally I remind them of the statistical background on the blackboard. Then I show them how to translate it into R. They should enter it as well into R. Then, I am explaining to them all the details how the code works and what one has to keep in mind. I distribute a script with all the examples and explanations and additional exercises (which can be easily done thanks to Friedrich Leisch's Sweave/Stangle/... function).

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