In this talk, we will present our approach to incorporating R and RStudio into a 10-week introductory statistics course for non-majors Cal Poly. Our primary contribution will be to share a series of Shiny Apps, created to ease students with no statistical or coding background into the philosophy of using programming tools to explore data. Our program was recently used in 3 sections of 35 students each this Fall, during which students were surveyed regularly for their reactions to the approach. We will demonstrate our new tools, discuss our successes and failures, share student-generated output, and summarize the results of our Fall survey.
Kelly teaches at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California, where she takes great joy in forcing statistical thought and R skills upon unsuspecting undergraduates. Her research is in clustering methods, digital humanities, and R tools for education. In her free time, she hikes and camps, plays board games, and tweets too much about R.
