Overview

For your third, and final (!!), mini-project, you will teach an introductory statistics topic to an introductory audience, using some sort of interactivity or animation.

Your audience for this project is an introductory statistics student, or “yourself from a few years ago”! Think of what would have helped you understand a concept that you struggled with and build it. Keep in mind things that we discuss in class this week: when interactivity helps vs hinders, telling a story vs encouraging exploration, etc.

For this project, you may work with a partner.

Options and Examples

This spring, I’m teaching Stat011, and I would love to include some of your projects as resources for my students! My syllabus for the spring includes:

  • 1-variable EDA
  • 2-variable EDA
  • Correlation
  • Linear Regression
  • Transformations
  • Sampling
  • Experiments vs Observational Studies
  • Ethics and Experimental Design
  • Basic probability
  • Conditional Probability
  • Bayes Rule
  • Sampling Distributions
  • P-Values
  • Confidence Intervals
  • Inference for Means
  • Inference for Proportions
  • Two-sample tests
  • Inference for Regression
  • ANOVA
  • Multiple Regression

You are welcome to choose a different topic, but it should be something related to introductory statistics.

Here are some possible formats for projects, broken down by how technically difficult I predict them to be:

  • Easier: Rmarkdown file with plotly graphs, knitted to HTML
    • By now, you’ve seen a lot of examples of how I write labs! If you choose this option, your project should “feel” like one of the labs, but include a plotly interactive graph (or a few).
  • Medium: flexdashboard or gganimate
    • Chapter 13 of Crump, Navarro, & Suzuki’s Answering Questions with Data – this chapter is gifs + code only, your project should include some more explanation
    • I couldn’t find a great flexdashboard example, but you can add some basic Shiny functionality to a flexdashboard (see documentation for more info) if you want to incorporate some shiny-esque elements without building a full app. You also may be more creative than me and have a great base flexdashboard idea!
    • Check out HTMLwidgets for more plotly-esque ways to add interactivity to flexdashboards and other HTML documents.
  • Challenging: Shiny App
    • Penn State’s Book of Apps for Teaching Statistics – these apps were completed by groups of students over a full summer, so I would not expect your mini-projects to be as complex as some of these. But they are definitely in the spirit of the project and provide some nice inspiration.

Submission

For this project, I expect most of you will want to submit an html version of your project. If you choose to use plot.ly, flexdashboard, or Shiny, you should use the RPubs or shinyapps option from Labs 09 and 10 to generate a URL for your knitted file. You should include your .rmd file in your moodle submission, and include the URL for your resulting document in the text box area on the same submission. If you prefer not to put your project on the web, you can also email it to me.

In addition to your project, you should include a separate 1-page-ish explanation of the work that you did and how you envision your project being used.

Rubric

A satisfactory project will:

  • Include all necessary code for recreation
  • Contain at least 2 interactive elements/animations
  • Be well-written and technically correct in all explanations and visualizations
  • Meet minimum submission quality for graphics (no typos, appropriate labels and font sizes, a readable theme)

An excellent project will meet all of the requirements for a satisfactory project, plus:

  • Complexity in either the depth of the concepts OR the backend
  • Sufficiently tested and de-bugged
  • Be publication-ready/especially polished.

Please include a self-grade (with explanation) at the end of your report. This is especially important for this project since much of what you do will be “behind the scenes”!