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Calling Bull Case Study — 99.9% Caffeine-free with R

Author(s): Carrie Diaz Eaton1, Carl Bergstrom2, Jevin West2

1. Bates College and QUBES 2. University of Washington

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Summary:
This is an adaptation of Calling Bull's Case Study on how caffeine free is hot chocolate versus coffee in order to make it into a student project that uses R.

Licensed under CC Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International according to these terms

Version 1.0 - published on 11 Nov 2020 doi:10.25334/4FN8-YV27 - cite this

Description

This is an adaptation of Calling Bull's Case Study on how caffeine free is hot chocolate versus coffee in order to make it into a student project that uses R (though it could be easily adapted for Excel, and I encourage someone to do so!). This assumes that students have RStudio installed and know how to use it to perform arithmetic operations.  It reviews making a script, saving scripts, and writing comments as professional practice outcomes. The Case Study itself gets us to think about assumptions, information at hand, units/stoichiometry, percents, and BS that is true, but meaningless marketing mumbo jumbo. In practice, I have them read the Case Study and the first couple of pages in advance of class and then students work in groups, and get "checked off" in class as complete during class or later in office hours or with a grader. 

Notes

This activity is in R, but could easily be adapted to Excel/Google Spreadsheets and I encourage someone to fork/adapt and do it!

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