We’ll use the penguins dataset to put your new R and ggplot skills to the test!

Load necessary libraries

Remember, if it’s the first time using any package, you’ll need to install the package first install.packages(“name_of_package”) before calling the library function

library(tidyverse)
library(palmerpenguins)
library(ggeasy) # this may be new to you, try googling it if you are unfamiliar with this package! 

First we’ll take a look at the penguins dataset

Let’s create a new variable called my_penguins to save this dataset to

head(penguins)

## # A tibble: 6 x 8
##   species island bill_length_mm bill_depth_mm flipper_length_~ body_mass_g sex  
##   <fct>   <fct>           <dbl>         <dbl>            <int>       <int> <fct>
## 1 Adelie  Torge~           39.1          18.7              181        3750 male 
## 2 Adelie  Torge~           39.5          17.4              186        3800 fema~
## 3 Adelie  Torge~           40.3          18                195        3250 fema~
## 4 Adelie  Torge~           NA            NA                 NA          NA <NA> 
## 5 Adelie  Torge~           36.7          19.3              193        3450 fema~
## 6 Adelie  Torge~           39.3          20.6              190        3650 male 
## # ... with 1 more variable: year <int>

my_penguins <- penguins # once you run this line of code, you will see my_penguins appear in your global environment

Getting to know the data

We went through this in Tuesday’s QnA session, so I’m including the code below, but see if you can answer the questions on your own!

1. How many species of penguins are included in this dataset? What are their names?
2. What is the range of the years?
3. How many islands are there? What are they?

levels(my_penguins$species) # levels() only works for factor variables   

## [1] "Adelie"    "Chinstrap" "Gentoo"

unique(my_penguins$species)

## [1] Adelie    Gentoo    Chinstrap
## Levels: Adelie Chinstrap Gentoo

my_penguins$year <- as.numeric(as.character(my_penguins$year))
range(my_penguins$year)

## [1] 2007 2009

levels(my_penguins$island)

## [1] "Biscoe"    "Dream"     "Torgersen"

Challenge Time!

Below you’ll see a series of plots generated from this dataset. Your task is simple…reproduce the plots! Okay, maybe it’s not such a simple task, but give it a go.