Teaching Statistical Computing Leveraging the Github Ecosystem

• Activity Number: 545
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Colin Rundel*
• Keywords: data science ; reproducibility ; github ; travis CI ; R ; education

Abstract

Teaching statistical computing has always been a challenge and has too often been treated as an after thought where students are expected to pick up the necessary tools and techniques along the way. With the rise of big data and data science it has become increasingly clear that students both expect and need focused training in this specific area of the discipline. In this talk we will focus on a new case study based Master's level Statistical Computing course taught for the first time at Duke University in the Fall of 2014. The talk will focus on ways in which we as statistical educators can adopt some of the tools and best practices of software engineers and other working practictioners to teach and improve the computing abilities of our students. We will focus in particular on the adoption of github and connected services like Travis-CI as an ideal platform for teaching students how to produce analyses that are of high quality, reproducible, and throughly tested while working in a team-based collaborative environment. We will discuss in detail course structure and logistics as well as give examples from the case studies used in the course.