Statistics on The Carpentries

Teaching Statistics in the 21st Century

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The late 1980s saw a wave of new undergraduate programs launched in computational physics, as the advent of affordable workstations and PCs made the power to compute and simulate more accessible. A decade later, though, many of those programs had drastically scaled back their ambitions or quietly wound down. The problem wasn’t the programming: the problem was that whenever a curriculum is designed as “X plus some Y”, it’s the Y that gets cut when time runs short, budgets are squeezed, or tough hiring decisions need to be made. “Computational physics” became “the physics we’ve always taught, but with assignments on computers” and then just “the physics we’ve always taught”.

My Favourite Tool - RStudio

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

My favorite tool is RStudio. This integrated development environment (IDE) is really a force multiplier for data analysis and reporting.

RStudio provides an excellent interface to the R programming language (that much should be obvious). However, it is much more than that. This application affords me easy workflows and shortcuts to interact with most of the other tools that I regularly use. These include:

My Favourite Tool - R

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

R can do anything - from making presentations, analyzing and plotting data to version control (Git).

I use it for absolutely everything! It’s not difficult to use and it’s free!

– Bianca Peterson, Temporary lecturer (Microbiology) & Project Coordinator (IT), South Africa

Have you got a favourite tool you would like to tell us about? Please use this form to add a bit of detail and we will do the rest. You can read the background to these posts here, or see what other tools people have written about.