Integrating Computing into the Statistics Curricula

A Workshop to Develop Educational Materials

Date: Sunday, July 26 to Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Location: U.C. Berkeley

Structure/Format of the Workshop

The idea we have is that we will divide into 4 groups each with 4 people. On Monday morning, each group will discuss the different projects that the group members brought to the workshop The idea is that each person will present their project(s) and get feedback and ideas from others about how to writeup and extend a project. This will help to explicitly identify the pedagogical goals and computational topics that it will cover, and to identify some of the potential obstacles (e.g. computationally intensive steps, the need for additional data, alternative sources of data). Hopefully people will then work together on a project.

We expect that after the initial discussion on Monday morning, people will move on to writing up the projects at two levels.

1. The immediate goal is to come up with an outline and high-level description of a) what the project is about and the steps involved, and b) how these connect to statistical computing. This material is for us as well as instructors who might want to use the material in her class.
2. The second goal, of course, is to produce a complete description of the problem along with solutions. We expect that only by sitting down to do some of the projects will potential difficulties become apparent. We will do this in the afternoon and on Tuesday morning. On Tuesday afternoon, the groups will write up the outline and status of each of the projects.

After lunch on Monday and Tuesday, we'll come together and review material that will be useful for all of us to keep in mind. This will hopefully help us to use and promote best practices in our solutions regarding writing good code and creating good graphics. We'll also discuss some tools that might be useful if we are turning these materials into both a printed and Web-based document(s).

We'll end on Wednesday morning by discussing all of the projects and creating a plan and schedule for completing the materials.

Schedule

Sunday Overview & Goals

Deb and Duncan will describe our vision of what we are trying to achieve and illustrate our write-ups for 2 or 3 different projects/case-studies.

Monday

8.30 - 12.00

Groups introduce and discuss each others topics/projects.

1.30 - 3.00 Technical Review

• R Programming Idioms, Luke Tierney
• Graphics Guidelines, Thomas Lumley
• Additional Graphics Facilities, Deb Nolan

3.00 - 5.30

Groups discuss and work on the projects.

Tuesday

8.30 - 12.00

Groups discuss and work on the projects.

1.30 - 2.30 Technical Review

Authoring Guidelines and Tools Duncan Temple Lang
Some or all of these topics which may also be covered on Wednesday.

• Structure of the chapters
• Writing conditional content for different audiences: students, instructors.
• R packages
• Data packages
• Version Control Repository
• Authoring tools for structured documents for print and Web
  • Word XML (RWordXML)
  • XDynDocs
  • Sweave
  • XDocTools

2.30 - 5.30 Technical Review

Groups wrap up their work on the projects, writing up a summary of what the plans are for each and who will work on them and consolidating work that has been done leading to a set of solutions.

Wednesday Review of Status & Plans

8.30 - 12 This will bring all the groups back together for a collective conversation. We'll review where we are on each of the topics and get an explicit break down of the projects. For each, we want to know

• whether they are case-studies or exercises?
• data, programming or simulation focused?
• who is planning to work on it?

We'll also get input and suggestions from others who were not in the original group discussing that project.

We'll also discuss how we want to proceed and concrete plans for producing the deliverables. This may involve more procedural matters regarding e.g. version control repositories, authoring formats, code style guidelines.