Renata Martell
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Lorenzo Garcia-Amaya, Assistant Professor
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Romance Languages and Literatures, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
Presentation Date: Thursday, April 22, 2021
Session: Session 2 (11am – 11:50am)
Breakout Room: Room 1
Presenter: 4
Abstract
The Speech Production Lab (SPL), housed in Michigan’s Department of Romance Languages & Literatures, utilizes various coding programs and software to complete many studies and projects. To utilize them most efficiently, the SPL began to ask how students learn to use programming languages best. Through various trials and group teaching methods, the SPL inferred that students learn best through independent learning at their own pace. Managing students’ varying schedules and a teaching team proved that group learning is not the most practical method for this software. This presentation will discuss a tutorial focused on independent learning to manage the RStudio software. Our goal was to help prospective coders with almost no computer science experience to become comfortable using RStudio. With this aim in mind, we have created a total of 150 slides in our tutorial. Each slide focuses on learning points such as acquiring basic coding skills, understanding the language, problem sets, and anything else necessary for learning to code in RStudio. After completing the entire tutorial, research assistants in the SPL will use RStudio for several tasks, including assigning variables, completing math problems, utilizing vectors, plotting data using SQL graphs, and creating data frames. Overall, they will have gained a universal understanding of coding basics. Though the tutorial is still in development, we expect the outcome to be a clear and concise document. We hope that fellow lab members can complete the tutorial in an estimated time of two weeks and become proficient in RStudio. We plan to introduce the tutorial to a small group of members first to collect feedback and redesign the lesson plans as advised. This tutorial’s more substantial outcomes will be transferable knowledge of research skills that anyone at Michigan can utilize as an open-source tool.
Authors: Renata Martell, Amelia Turco, Lorenzo Garcia-Amaya
Research Method: Language Skills
