Keywords: Grammar of Graphics; ggplot2; Curriculum
Wilkinson (2005) introduced the Grammar of Graphics (GoG) which provides a fundamental foundation for the construction of graphs. Shortly thereafter, Wickham (2009, 2016), wrote the widely used ggplot2 package in R which directly implements many of the elements of GoG. Some associate GoG with ggplot2; however, GoG is software independent and is implemented in a variety of software packages used for visualization. The focus of this work is to share our experience in teaching GoG and other important elements of visualization, e.g. Elementary Perceptual Tasks, Gestalt Principles, to undergraduates. In addition, various teaching strategies, e.g. critique, pencil/paper, same data / many graphs, will be presented in this work.