Thanks to those who came along to today's RSS Manchester session about teaching data wrangling with {messy}. There were so many useful questions at the end - my to-do list just got longer!

Slides: https://nrennie.rbind.io/talks/rss-manchester-messy/

I'm really looking forward to delivering this talk about creating data for teaching and testing using the {messy} package in July for the RSS Manchester Local Group!

Thursday 10 July 2025
1.00PM - 2.00PM BST
Online (everyone welcome!)

Register: https://rss.org.uk/training-events/events/events-2025/local-groups/making-messy-data-creating-more-realistic,-synthet/

The {messy} package is now available on CRAN!

Read the introductory blog post here: https://nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introducing-messy-r-package/

Save the date for UKCOTS 2025!

24th-25th June 2025

University of Glasgow, UK

A conference for anyone with an interest in the teaching of statistics in higher education in whatever department or discipline

Link: https://www.ukcots.org/

If you're teaching R, or statistics, and you want your students to get more practice of data wrangling with "messy" data, you can use the {messy} package to turn the clean data you currently use for examples into more realistic looking data!

GitHub: https://github.com/nrennie/messy

I had a great time teaching a "Writing Better R Code" workshop for some of our Faculty of Health and Medicine postgraduates today!

AM: Workflows, linting, code structure, writing a reprex, and managing dependencies
PM: Introduction to collaborating on R code using Git and GitHub

New Teaching Programming Journal Club!

Interested in topics related to teaching coding to students without a strong programming background?

Join the first session:
16 October 2024
08:00 PT/11:00 EST/ 16:00 BST
Zoom

More information: https://www.rose-network.org/events/teaching-programming-journal-club

Open Case Studies https://www.opencasestudies.org/
"demonstrates illustrative data analyses that can be used in the classroom to teach students how to effectively derive knowledge from data"
Article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26939169.2024.2394541
#MathEd #StatsEd #EdDev #Teaching #DataScience

It's the last day of RSS Conference today! I'll be speaking in the "Schools, outreach and the digital world: how can we deliver statistical and data literacy for all?" session at 3.20pm in Oxford Hall!

Come along to hear from this year's William Guy lecturers alongside other speakers about some of the outreach work we've done with schools!

If you're at RSS Conference today, come along to the Lancaster room for 11.30 session to hear me chatting about some of the wonderful things you can use webR for when teaching R! (Plus other talks about teaching R in an accessible way!)

The 2024-2025 William Guy Lectureship videos are now available!

If you'd like a version of the talk aimed at 11-16 year olds delivered for your school (online or locally in person), please do get in touch!

Link: https://rss.org.uk/policy-campaigns/policy-groups/education-policy-advisory-group/rss-william-guy-lecturers/current-william-guy-lecturers-2024-25/

New blog post

A short blog post about how I've been using Quarto to create two versions of R tutorial worksheets: one with questions, one with answers!

Two tricks:
parameterised documents
conditional content

Blog post: https://nrennie.rbind.io/blog/r-tutorial-worksheets-quarto/

It's official. I'll be submitting my PhD on the construct validity of the Statistics Anxiety Rating Scale at the end of June!

Here's my official abstract as a teaser of the various pre-prints that I'll be dropping over the summer!