JedR Academy

“Always pass on what you have learned.” – Yoda

Overview

To be clear, this isn’t a package. It’s some training material. Here is a list of released lessons.

This project is a series of learnr interactive tutorials designed to develop and improve R skills with a heavy lean on the tidyverse. There are two main goals:

  • To focus tutorials on feats of skill or tasks to accomplish instead of on specific packages or functions.
  • To use the same data whenever possible to avoid the cognitive load of learning new data for each example.

There are two types of lessons:

  • JedR Training: Tutorials focused on feats of skills instead of on specific packages. For instance, “How to manage dates” vs “How to use lubridate.”
  • JedR Trials: Short tests over specific skills. These trials are used by students in our J 327D Reporting with Data class.

JedR Padawans can download the repo and run each notebook on their local machines. The notebooks are stored in the training/ and trials/ folders. All notebooks require tidyverse, learnr and gradethis. Some notebooks might require additional packages.

Once you open a notebook, use the Run Document option.

Run Document

Data sources

While we strive to use the starwars data as much as possible, we’ve had to introduce other Star Wars related data in some situations.

All data is in the data/ folder except starwars which is utilized from tidyverse.

  • starwars characters data that is part of the tidyverse. It’s our main data set. Small enough to wrap your head around; complex and dirty enough to provide good examples.
  • starwarsrebels is a list of episodes of Star Wars Rebels from tvmaze.com

Other possible data sources

These might be explored later.

  • SWAPI
  • Star Wars Databank
  • We’ve pulled some data from Kaggle, which notes “This data was gathered using the Star Wars API that is no longer available. The origin of the data is The Star Wars Wiki.”
    • characters
    • planets
    • species
    • starships
    • vehicles
  • Found some additional data on data.world that yielded a couple new sets:
    • survey (done from Five Thirty Eight, apparently)
    • principles
    • soundtracks
    • rt_ratings
    • imdb_ratings

Credits

This project was the brainchild of Christian McDonald, associate professor of practice at the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin. He began collaborating soon thereafter with Dr. Jo Lukito, an assistant professor also at UT JaM.

Other contributors include:

  • Christian Overgaard, Doctoral student. He helped think through the project and wrote the “Managing dates” tutorial.
  • Tamara Rodriguez designed our JedR hex logo.