Week 1 - 2 content update

[yangsophieee]

Common trip ups experienced by students

(Apologies if this content is actually covered, I missed Tuesday's lab and haven't read through the lab material in detail, so it could be that students aren't reading properly!)

• Many could not figure out how to load the data. Do they know that the R project file sets their working directory in the folder and they need to use relative paths to get to the data?
• Many didn't seem to know how functions work, e.g. what arguments are. It seems they don't know the ?help tip to bring up the help page, which would be helpful when you introduce functions like janitor::clean_names()
• Some students were forgetting about needing to assign values to variables, e.g. they save the data to stalagmites_data then ran clean_names(stalagmites_data) without saving it like stalagmites_data <- clean_names(stalagmites_data)
• Sometimes filter() would throw an uninformative error which would be fixed when I specified dplyr::filter(). Maybe R is getting mixed up between stats::filter() and dplyr::filter()? I don't know why this was happening on some of the student's sessions, but not for other students.
• When we introduce the pipe |> there's an example with two chunks, one using the pipe and one without. They produce different outputs (3 and 8) which is confusing. I think the second chunk needspenguins$island
• Both I and some students were confused when reproducing Fig. 3 what 'annual growth rate' was. I think it is just lamina thickness but this is not super clear.

[yangsophieee]

Fonti mentioned today that running library(tidyverse) first should mask stats::filter() so I think some students are forgetting to run it first.