What are the tutorials?
The class tutorials are documents that provide a guided walkthrough of a particular set of data analysis problems and techniques or specific R packages and tools. They provide a small amount of background explanation of analysis topics and R’s inner workings, but focus mostly on practical application of R to problem solving.
The tutorials are presented in R Markdown .html files and can be viewed in a standard browser window such as GoogleChrome or FireFox.
How to effectively use the tutorials
The tutorials are designed to introduce students to R code that can be used to solve specific applied data questions. They are not a stand-alone resource that is sufficient to provide a solid understanding of how to use R.
Students should plan on not just reading the tutorial - which is likely to be entirely ineffective at improving R coding ability or understanding - but opening this tutorial side-by-side with their own RStudio window in which they type in and run each line of code. This allows the student to test each line of code independently and provides an opportunity (sometimes explicitly encouraged in the tutorials) to further examine the data or test the functions on examples not run in the tutorial.
As the tutorials provide an introduction to practical application of R they should, ideally, be run after doing background reading and before attending class.
Again, I think of the tutorials as neccessary but not sufficient. They should be supplemented with reading, lecture, and practice. Similarly, to keep the length of the tutorials down, the examples presented are typically ‘bare bones’ and student exploration of the data and functions introduced in the tutorials while they are working through the tutorials is highly reccomended.