Shiny in Secondary Education

October 2024 | Shiny in Production

Gareth Burns

Exploristics

About Me

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Gareth Burns

Data Scientist, Exploristics

🧑‍💼️ Worked in a wide range of industries using R to make data-driven decisions
🦡 🌿 🌾 🏥 🤖 🐟 🛥️ 🏥

✏️ Develop KerusCloud: a cloud-based clinical-trial simulation SaaS application

📢 Passionate about Scientific Communication

PSI Schools Outreach

  • Promoting opportunities in pharmaceutical/ healthcare industry
  • Sharing working with data and use of numeracy skills in industry
  • Encouraging relevant STEM studies to inspire NextGen into industry
  • PSI Schools Outreach 🔗

Contributors

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Steve Mallett

Senior Manager, Veramed

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Alex Spiers

Principal Statistician, GSK

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Katie Gwinnell

Placement Student, Bayer

Contributors

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Emma Crawford

Statistician, PSI

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My Luong Vuong

Statistician, Kuleuven

Project Objectives

Shiny in Secondary Education objectives:

  • Interactive Learning: Engages students with interactive content & easy to grasp statistical concepts but developing understanding.
  • Data Literacy: Aligned with National Curriculum.
  • Showcase: Demonstrates technology enabled industry.
  • Fun & Engaging 🤡🎉

Timeline

First Contact

  • Passionate Volunteers
  • Community Initiative
  • Limited Resources

Agile

Agile Principle #2

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

Agile

Agile Principle #2

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

Changing Requirements

Scope

Changing Requirements

Asthma Workshop

Changing Requirements

Stroop Test

Changing Requirements

Stroop Test with cross-over design

Changing Requirements

The application is broke 2 hours before I’ve to use it with students

Rewind

Technology in Schools

…if written and mental arithmetic are secure. In both primary and secondary schools, teachers should use their judgement about when ICT tools should be used 1

Should we even be using an Shiny!?

Technology

Why use technology in for learning statistics?

  • Reinforce learning
  • Increase classroom engagement
  • Demonstrate technological proficiency in work
  • Real-time feedback
  • Generational shift in expectations from digital natives

Workshop Workflow

Previous workshops lasted c.45 - 60 mins had the following general workflow. Where would Shiny fit in and would it potential distract?

flowchart LR
  A(Introduction) --> B{Randomisation}
  B --> C{Practical Experiment}
  C --> D{Data Recording/Entry}
  D --> E{Statistical Analysis}
  E --> F(Conclusion)

Stroop Test

Say the background colour of the word, not the word itself1

RED

GREEN

BLUE

PURPLE

RED

ORANGE

BLUE

PURPLE

GREEN

Stroop Test

Say the colour of the ink word, not the word itself1

RED

GREEN

BLUE

PURPLE

RED

ORANGE

BLUE

PURPLE

GREEN

Accessibilty

Execution

Abstraction

Often we want Shiny applications to carry out complex statistical logic on behalf of users and display some business outcome or aggregated summary to users. However our objective was to showcase this statistical logic!

Randomisation

Added a button so the user required to explicitly had carry out randomisation.

  • Web Trident
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Javascript
  • reactivePoll& ggplot2 📦

Data Entry

Initial designs and experiments required manual data entry which caused some issues…

  • Data Governance
    • Privacy by design
  • Validation1
  • Editing incorrect data

Self-serving data capture

  • ReactiveVal & InvalidateLater
    • Custom CSS
  • Reset State
    • OOP (R6)

Which Visualisations?

Every data scientists favourite plot… .

Aligned with curriculum and classroom learning.

Dynamic Feedback

  • Data Exploration
  • Real-time feedback
  • Gameification
  • Aligned with practical example
  • Generated discussion on outlines

WATCH OUT FOR EMPTY STATE

Panic!

My prototype is about to be used as a live application

Pareto Principle

20 percent of the effort to achieve 80% of outcomes.

80%

20%

Pareto Principle

Tip

Ideal for MVP/prototyping!

Pareto Principle

Expected time/effort to completion

Actual time/effort to completion

Warning

80% work includes: - Application State - Responsiveness - Edge Cases - Scalability - Accessibility etc..

Walkthrough

Walkthrough

This slide was an iframe of the application deployed locally. Check out the Jumping Rivers YouTube channel for a walk-through.

Returning to school to give a successful demonstration!

Project Feedback

  1. Interactive Learning:
  2. Showcase:
  1. Data Literacy:
  2. Fun & Engaging

How you can contribute

🗣️ Provide feedback

👩‍🔬 Promote STEM to the next generation

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Join the team of volunteers!

❓Ask questions!