Information for instructors
Table of Contents
Slide presentation
There are two slide presentations that can be used to present the material described in this book (you will need to right click and select 'Open link in new tab'):
The HTML presentation can be run in any browser. The Shiny presentation needs to be run through RStudio (open the document in RStudio and click run presentation - make sure that shiny has been installed). The Shiny presentation has interactive sections for the slides on conditionals and functions.
Interactive teaching techniques
This can be a really fun course to run. Here are some examples of interactive activities that you can use:
- Split the attendees into teams and get them to come up with team names. Use these team names throughout the workshop when asking for volunteers
- To illustrate the different data types, print out squares of coloured paper (use a different colour for each data type) and get attendees to fill in examples of the appropriate data type for each square. Here is a template (you will need to right click and select 'Save link as...')
- Ask attendees to use the coloured paper data types to create examples of data structures
- Use an online timer to let attendees know how long they have for each challenge
- Create data structures of people. Get a team to come up to the front and demonstrate a vector/matrix/list of people
- When discussing conditionals, get attendees to play 'Simon Says'
- When discussing loops, get attendees to give you dance moves to dance out. Show the code written as both a loop and as an exhaustive list of instructions
- When discussing functions, get attendees to act as your computer and ask them for the output to a function, such as
nameTheSinger - Get attendees to email you their scratch creations so that you can have a show-and-tell session at the end of the workshop