New academic year has started for most of us. I try to do a range of activities on the first day of my introductory statistics course, and one of them is an incredibly brief activity to just show students what R is and what the RStudio window looks like. Here it is:
Generate a random number between 1 and 5, and introduce yourself to that many people sitting around you:
sample(1:5, size = 1)
It’s a good opportunity to have students access RStudio once, talk about random sampling, and break up the class session and have them introduce themselves to their fellow classmates. I usually do the activity too, and use it as an opportunity to personally introduce myself to a few students and to meet them.
If you’re interested in everything else I’m doing in my introductory statistics course you can find the course materials for this semester at http://bit.ly/sta101_f15 and find the source code for all publicly available materials like slides, labs, etc. at https://github.com/mine-cetinkaya-rundel/sta101_f15. Both of these will be updated throughout the semester. Feel free to grab whatever you find useful.
