General Information

This is the website for the School of Global Policy and Strategy skills course in the R programming language. This course will introduce you the R programming language and how to use R to work with data from GapMinder. In order to earn a certificate of proficiency, you must attend all of the class meetings for the course, do the short coding assignments, and pass the short, in-class quiz at the end of the course. Courses begin on Monday, January 4th. This is the first day of instruction, winter quarter.

Who: The course is aimed at GPS graduate students. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of programming or the tools presented in the course to attend.

Where: Room 3202, 9500 Gilman Drive, #0519, La Jolla, CA. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.

Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a few specific software packages installed (listed below).

Contact: Please mail timdennis@ucsd.edu for more information.

Assessment: A certificate of proficiency will be given to the student who:

• 20% Attends and participates in classes
• 40% Passes all in-course quizzes
• 40% Satisfactorily completes the weekly homework assignments

Need help?:

• Tim Dennis: Email timdennis@ucsd.edu or schedule an appointment
• Youngsun Kwon yok005@ucsd.edu, Office Hours: Tues. 11-1pm Library Data/GIS Lab in 2 West Geisel
• Library Data/GIS Lab has R specialists

Data: We will be using the 5 year gapminder data. You can go ahead and set up a RStudio project and download the data following these instructions. The CSV can be downloaded from here.

Lecture notes & command histories:

Day 1 - Jan. 9, 2017

• Notes: Intro to R & RStudio, Project Management, and Seking Help, Data Structures, Commands:R Script

• Notes: Data Types, Commands:R Script
• Exploring Data Frames

Day 2 - Jan. 18, 2017

• Lecture notes: Plotting with GGPLOT2, Commands:R Script - part 1

Credits: The course materials are adpated from the Software Carpentry lessons. Many thanks to the authors of those lessons.

---

Schedule

Date	Class	Topics
Jan. 9	Lecture	Intro to R & RStudio - Project Mgmt - Data structures - Data frames
	Quiz & Assignment	Quiz 1 – Assignment 1
Jan. 18	Lecture	Plotting with GGPLOT2
	Quiz & Assignment	Quiz 2 - Assignment 2
Jan. 23	Functions, data preparation & cleaning	Subsetting R objects - creating functions, dplyr & tidyr
	Quiz & Assignment	Quiz 3 - Assignment 3

Etherpad: http://pad.software-carpentry.org/2017-gps-r.
We will use this Etherpad for chatting, taking notes, and sharing URLs and bits of code.

---

Syllabus

---

Setup

To participate in this course, you will need access to the software described below. In addition, you will need an up-to-date web browser.