De Menos a Distinto: Estudio de la Implantación de R en las asignaturas del grado de estadística

Abstract

Teaching computer science in degrees that are not computer science related presents an important challenge: to motivate the students and to achieve good average grades. The student’s complaint is always based on his lack of motivation: What is this subject useful for? and this is specially relevant when this subject is not easy to learn by the student. In this paper we show the case of computer courses in the Statistics degree taught in the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) (two Catalan universities). We initially tried to reduce the complexity of their contents in order to obtain better average grades. Yet, it did not workout as expected. Therefore, we changed our strategy and instead of making the contents easier (less complex), we changed the tools that were used to teach and tried to adapt them to the students’ interests. In this particular case, we decided to use the R programming language, a language widely used by statisticians, in order to explain the basics of programming. Therefore, we changed our strategy from less (simpler contents) to different (more elaborated and nontrivial contents adapted to meet their expectations).