Tutorials
What are Tutorials?
Each week, there will be a tutorial containing explanations, examples, and practice tasks for new coding skills, techniques, and functions for that week. Each tutorial will be released as an assignment project on Posit Cloud, with an accompanying workbook to help you work through it. Tutorials contain both hints and solutions for all required tasks, so you don’t ever have to worry about getting stuck.
By default, all of the content in the tutorials could potentially come up on assessments, including weekly quizzes, the TAP, and the exam. It is essential that you work through them carefully and are able to understand and use the code and techniques they contain.
Any sections marked as optional are exceptions to this rule, and will not come up on assessments, although you are welcome to use the techniques in optional sections on assessments if you want to. “MoRe About” boxes and ChallengR tasks are always optional, but you may also see other sections clearly marked as optional, so you can choose to complete them or not. Of course, you’re strongly recommended to look through them - we include them because we think they will help you!
When to Complete Tutorials
Tutorials are released on Thursday mornings each week. The content of the tutorials will be assessed in weekly quizzes the following week. For example, Tutorial 02 will be released on Thursday of Week 2 of term, and the content will be assessed in the quiz in the following week’s practicals, i.e. Week 3.
You can complete the tutorials whenever you like between their release and your own practical session, but you’re strongly recommended to work on them earlier rather than later, so you can get help if you need it.
Opening the Tutorials
When you are ready to work on a tutorial, we recommend you do the following:
- Log into Posit Cloud and open the Analysing Data workspace.
- Open the assignment project for the relevant week.
- In the Files pane, click on “tutorial”, then on the workbook Qmd document.
- Run the first code chunk in the workbook document, which will open the tutorial in the Viewer pane.
However, the tutorials can also be easily accessed at any time through this website, so it isn’t necessary to open Posit Cloud to view them - simply use the sidebar to jump to the tutorial you want!
Content
Looking for a particular topic or function? Use the Topics Reference to find what you need!
Tasks
The tasks in tutorials are designed to build your skills in R. Some will ask you to try something you might not know exactly how to do. Just give it your best shot, and if you get stuck, solutions and explanations are always provided!
It is strongly recommended that you don’t skip the tasks. Try each one, even if it seems completely trivial, or too hard. You will learn R much faster and more thoroughly by getting stuck in.
Tutorial tasks are also often very similar to tasks for practical worksheets/quizzes and TAP questions, so you will be best prepared for these assessments by tackling every tutorial task.
Hints and Solutions
Click to expand the example boxes below.
It is possible to go through the whole tutorial just reading the solutions, and never trying to solve the tasks yourself. Please don’t do this! You should always attempt the task before you look at the solution; and it’s best if you type out the solution yourself into your workbook document, rather than copying it.
To understand why, imagine that instead of R, you are learning to speak a new language, like BSL or French. Similarly, think of the TAP assessment as a “conversation” task: you will need to be able to converse in your new language in order to complete the assessment successfully. No matter how many times you read the answers in a textbook or watch new signs in a video, it will always be more difficult to produce and use that language in a new context than if you had practiced using those words or signs yourself. It doesn’t matter if you make grammatical mistakes (i.e. get errors in R) or don’t always get the right answer - the most important thing is to try a little bit at a time, and you will improve!
Info
This is an example of a Vocab box. These boxes highlight essential terms and concepts, especially that have new names you might not have encountered before, or are familiar terms that have a new or different meaning in R, data science, or statistics.
You should take special note of Vocab boxes, as the content in them is very likely to come up in quizzes and exams, as well as be useful for successfully completing the tasks.
These are “MoRe About” boxes. They often contain extra information, more explanations/examples, or more in-depth explorations of a particular concept, skill, or feature of R. They are always optional, which anything that only comes up in the MoRe About boxes won’t appear on assessments. However, reading through them will help you understand and use R better!