Description

Basic programming and data analysis skills are becoming increasingly important in undergraduate biology education, yet content requirements and time constraints prohibit in-depth instruction on programming and analysis in most biology courses. Educators and students need tools to efficiently learn basic programming skills, statistics, and analytical approaches in a framework that supports integration of biology content.

In this session, we will explore Swirl, an interactive platform for learning and teaching R in the R console that can be used to efficiently integrate programming and data analysis instruction into a range of undergraduate biology courses. In addition to utilizing existing Swirl courses, instructors can design custom interactive courses using the Swirlify package to support class objectives. Participants will receive an introduction to Swirl and existing publicly-available Swirl courses, a tutorial on developing customized Swirl courses, and will work to develop short Swirl courses of their own to analyze provided biological datasets. Participants should be comfortable performing basic data analysis in R.

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