Thoughts for next year

[lwjohnst86]

This is an issue to start adding ideas or things to improve for next year.

Challenges

• Give several csv data files with some slightly messy bits in each file and get them to read in each file, tidy it up, and put into a single data frame, in as little lines of (properly styled) code.
• Give them a dataset and show them a cleaned up wrangled version (convert to wide, combine columns, etc). Tell them to get their output to look like ours in as little code as possible (or even just get them to do it).
• Do more of those "try to reproduce this figure with code".

Note: We should really make sure to go over the code from the example and explain why and the reasoning behind doing it a particular why... to encourage "ocmputational thinking".

Lesson content & order

• Introduce Git/GitHub sooner and get them doing basic things with it earlier on (like make an Issue. Take a screenshot of a git log output. Etc).
• Do a session on project workflow, filenaming, file organization etc (just judging from the current final assignments)
• Emphasize importance of exploratory data analysis/visualization
• Add in a section to R Markdown lectures on using bibliographies/citations?

I'll add more as I think about it

[lwjohnst86]

... more:

Final assignment

• We need to be clearer about how to submit the final assignment. There were no instructions for where to submit the report, to make sure to generate an html file, and to write a self-assessment (we forgot to make this all clear).
• Clarify how exactly to make sure the html_document is entirely self-contained. We forgot to talk about this more and make it be clear how to do this.
• Have them assign an "editor" or "proofreader" role to one or two of the team members.
• Make sure to get them to do exploratory data visualization as part of the results.
• Don't forget to get them to give us their own self-assessment (we forgot to do this).
• Idea: Get teams to "review" (like in peer review) another team's report a week before the due date (make the student's own review worth marks) so that team's reports are a bit better/proofread through/makes sense. This is tricky to implement though...
• Have as part of the grade them to publish the report with a DOI via figshare (makes it easier for us too, to see the final version)