Learning Log Forum

Week 1 Coding

Questions

1. When I first heard that the internship involved learning how to code in R I felt (mostly) excited.

I took a course MATH1041 in first year, which used R, and I thought it was a really great software. Then, when taking the second and third year stats courses which used JAMOVI, PSY, SPSS, I realised how great R was compared to these other programs. So, I am excited to finally have a course which uses R again. Even though it is much more complicated to learn and understand, I think it is much more powerful and effective, as well as satisfying.

2. The hardest thing I have encountered about learning R this week was the pipeline. It was something completely new to me, and took a while to wrap my head around what it did. I found it difficult to understand what to write in the input line to get the correct groupings and summaries, as well as what specific language to use.

3. I overcame this R challenge by watching Danielle’s video two or three times. This helped me to go over what she was saying and watch her work through the example. This then meant that when I worked through the exercise myself, I was able to better remember what she had done, and then try it out myself. It took me a few attempts but by the end of the exercise I got a grasp of it!

4. Next on my R learning journey, I need to practice what I have learnt! I understand what we have gone through so far, however I am not sure whether I would be able to do it in different exercises, especially when there are multiple different aspects that each draws on different things. I think by practicing and doing more exercises this would help me consolidate what I have learnt. Also, inputing data that has a different file name, or doing a pipeline that has different groups would likely stump me for a bit so practicisng with these would be helpful for my learning.