Incubator Lesson Spotlight: R and the Tidyverse for Working with Data

The Incubator Lesson Spotlight highlights a lesson under development by our community in The Carpentries Incubator. In this edition, we look at the progress being made on the “R and the Tidyverse for Working with Data” lesson, and hear from the authors about how The Carpentries community can get involved with the ongoing development of this lesson.

Lesson Profile

• Title: “R and the Tidyverse for Working with Data”
• Lesson Pages: https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/r-tidyverse-4-datasets/
• Lesson Repository: https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/r-tidyverse-4-datasets

Learning Objectives

• To understand fundamentals of visualisation with ggplot2
• To be able to subset and alter data for your needs
• To be able to effectively alter the shape of data (pivoting)
• To be able to summarise data efficiently

Target Audience

Anyone working with data sets that want to learn efficient ways of wrangling and visualising that data with R, using the tidyverse.

Lesson Progress

This material has been applied during SWC lessons in Oslo 3 times now, using the general state of the materials. Small adjustments are made each time, based on learner feedback, but the overall goals remain the same. Learners are very positive in their feedback of the lesson, and many say they leave with a better understanding of efficient ways of working in R, using the tidyverse.

How You Can Help Develop This Lesson

We would love to see the content tried by others also and see if the lesson works well for others too. They way we teach it, we always cover each episode, though we might at times skip the later stages of an episode if we fall behind. We are still a little apprehensive of the across lesson, and often find we don’t have time for that in two days. It is also quite advanced to use (functional programming) and we are uncertain if novices can grasp the concept in such a short time. We have tried to keep everything detached from any specific field of science, and hope others see this too.

We would prefer discussions around the lesson materials to come as issues to the repo.

---

About This Series

Incubator Lesson Spotlight is a regular feature in The Carpentries blog and Carpentries Clippings newsletter, highlighting the great work our community is doing to develop new lessons in The Carpentries Incubator. Developers of any lesson in the Incubator are encouraged to submit details about their material for inclusion in the series. If you would like to increase the visibility of your lesson and encourage Carpentries community members to contribute to its ongoing development, fill in this short form.