Welcome to JedR Academy

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

What is JedR Academy?

To be clear, this isn’t a package.

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

Installation

JedR Padawans can complete these lessons online through the provided links, without additional setup. For those who prefer working locally, you can download the repo to Render each notebook directly on your machine. The notebooks are organized in the /trials and /training folders.

Packages

Ensure that you have the following packages downloaded as they are required for JedR Academy to function properly.

  • tidyverse
  • gradethis

Quarto CLI

Download Quarto CLI for your corresponding operating system.

Quarto-Live

Once you open the repository, to use the quarto-live extension in your own documents, follow the steps below using a Quarto project as the working directory:

  • Open the terminal in RStudio.

  • Paste the following command and run it:

    quarto add r-wasm/quarto-live

  • Follow the remaining prompts, and Quarto Live will be installed.

For more information, check out the quarto-live documentation.

Data sources

Our lessons are built around the Star Wars universe, primarily utilizing the starwars “characters” data from the tidyverse package. To enhance these lessons, we’ve incorporated additional Star Wars data, which can be found in the /data folder. The starwars data from tidyverse offers a well-sized dataset that’s both approachable and intricate, making it a valuable learning tool. If you’d like to read more about the data click here.

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.
  • Johan Villatoro, a UT Journalism undergraduate student, transitioned lessons and training into WebR.