no-one is using the etherpad.
by 1745 (15 minutes in) some people had made a plot, most people downloading and installing.
by 1800 (30 minutes in), many people have a plot.
installing on arch and gentoo is hard (arch user gave up installing Rstudio and used command line; gentoo user had to use VNC!). Installing on Ubuntu was hard too.
Someone asked "what does pch=1
do?" (in the call to legend
)
On Windows, setting the language to Greek means the Rstudio installer has all the wrong characters. much emojibake. seems to work though!
Wifi. one person found it unreliable. Didn't seem particularly fast for anyone.
If using a version of R < 3.2 then the mirrors don't generally carry packages for older versions. So you're SOL.
When specifically asking people for verbal feedback the general responses were that it was helpful, friendly, nice format. Many people wanted more (quite a few without prompting asked if it was running next week at the same time). When specifically asked what did people want more of the responses were: more R (twice); pandas; iceberg; SPSS; bring-our-own-data.
We should've made a guest list and ticked people off (if only to get accurate numbers)
Q: Any diff between
<-
and=
for assignment? Both used in session materials. A: No diff if assigning outside a function arg.<-
preferred for legacy reasons.Q: Any diff between single and double quotes. Both used in session materials. A: Seems that no difference between single and double quotes (but obvs need them to match). People tend to only use single quotes around single chars.
library(help=datasets)
raises error if library help pane in RStudio is too narrow (as was the case for one student where she had RStudio on one side and session material on other side of a small screen.Gentoo user was connecting to Gentoo from Surface using VNC. Only had problems because help couldn't fire up Firefox as was tied to another Firefox session. This chap was happy enough and accepted that his means for accessing RStudio was unconventional:)
Two students wanted to place the legend outside the plotting area. They found two different solutions on Stack Overflow, one being more concise, the other offering a cleaner separation of concerns.
ToothGrowth exercise can result in unexpected plots as students not told which var to use to colour points. If plot the factor
ToothGrowth$supp
on the x axis then get a box plot rather than scatter plot. Might be a good idea to say in instructions "try plotting ToothGrowth$dose vs ToothGrowth$len then ToothGrowth$supp vs ToothGrowth$len; why are these plots different?"Three students (!) asked whether R would be useful for visualising/analysing CFD outputs (two asked about Fluent, another OpenFoam). A colleague of mine (the Gentoo chap; see above) tells me that Fluent has good in-built tools for visualising results in 2D or 3D. AFAIK OpenFoam is a just computation engine (not an integrated analysis environment with GUI) so R may be more useful here. However, I couldn't find any mention of OpenFoam on CRAN, looks like OpenFoam has its own file format and the OpenFoam site points people towards using Paraview for visualising outputs.
If decide to keep using Etherpad (I vote we do so for at least another sessinon) we should include the feedback link at the start (and I need to remember to check the Etherpad and prompt people to leave feedback!)