adventr: R tutorials for An Adventure in Statistics (Field, 2016)

The adventr package contains a series of interactive tutorials that teach R alongside chapters of my 2016 textbook An Adventure in Statistics: the reality enigma. The tutorials are written using a package called learnr. Once a tutorial is running it's a bit like reading a book but with places where you can practice the R code that you have just been taught. The adventr package is free (as are all things R-related) and offered to support tutors and students using my textbook who want to learn R.

Contents of adventr

The package was written initially to support my own teaching on a module where I base the content around An Adventure in Statistics. One quirk of this is that there are some advanced tutorials on topics not covered in the book (but continue the themes of the book ...). Another quirk is that - at present - there are some chapters that don't have associated tutorials (for example, the Chapter on probability).

The tutorials are named to correspond (roughly) to the relevant chapter of the book. For example, adventr_03 would be a good tutorial to run alongside teaching related to chapter 3, and so on.

• adventr_02: Data basics in R and RStudio
• adventr_03: Summarizing data (introducing ggplot2)
• adventr_04: Fitting models (central tendency)
• adventr_05: Presenting data (summarizing groups and more ggplot2)
• adventr_08: Inferential statistics and robust estimation (covers Chapter 9 too)
• adventr_11: Hypothesis testing
• adventr_14: The general linear model
• adventr_15: Comparing two means
• adventr_15_rm: Comparing two means (repeated measures)
• adventr_16: Comparing several means
• adventr_16_rm: Comparing several means (repeated measures)
• adventr_17: Factorial designs
• adventr_mlm: Multilevel models (not covered in the book)
• adventr_growth: Growth models (not covered in the book)
• adventr_log: Logistic regression (not covered in the book)

Installing adventr

To use adventr you first need to install R and RStudio. There are detailed instructions on how to do this at the end of this webpage along with some introductory material to get you oriented to R and RStudio. Once you have installed R and RStudio you can install adventr. The package is in development so you have to install it from github. To install the package execute (in RStudio):

install.packages("remotes") #if you don’t already have it installed
library(remotes)
install_github("profandyfield/adventr")

If you are trying to install on a networked computer the install might fail (it's to do install.packages not liking UNC paths, which I'm not even going to pretend to understand). The solution is to specify the location of your R library at the point of install. Most networks will map network locations to a drive name (for example, at my own University, users accounts are on the 'N' drive). Find the location of your R library (e.g., N:/Documents/R/win-library/3.5), possibly executing .libPaths() to help you, and specify this location using the lib argument:

library(remotes) 
remotes::install_github("profandyfield/adventr", lib = "N:/Documents/R/win-library/3.5")

To run a particular tutorial execute:

library(adventr)
learnr::run_tutorial("name_of_tutorial", package = "adventr")

and replace "name of tutorial" with the name of the tutorial you want to run. For example, to run tutorial 3 (for Chapter 3) execute:

learnr::run_tutorial("adventr_03", package = "adventr")

The name of each tutorial is in bold in the list above. Once the command to run the tutorial is executed it will spring to life in a web browser.

Suggested workflow

The tutorials are self-contained (you practice code in code boxes) so you don't need to use RStudio at the same time. However, to get the most from them I would recommend that you open two RStudio sessions (i.e. two RStudio windows running simultaneously). Use one RStudio session to run the tutorial. You won't then be able to use this RStudio window (because its resources are allocated to the tutorial). In the second RStudio session try replicating what you learn in the tutorial. That is, open a new script file and everything you do in the tutorial, practice in the script file (and save it). This workflow has the advantage of not just teaching you the code that you need to do certain things, but also provides practice in using RStudio itself.