cichlids

Pre Bootcamp workout

Welcome to EEB 201, R Bootcamp for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 2021 Back In Person Edition. The goal of this course is to provide a broad introduction to scientific programming in the R environment. Ideally the skills you begin to develop in this course will be refined over your first year as you take classes in the core series and begin your own research. Check out the syllabus for more details.

Preparation

To get things started, we would like you to get R installed and complete some of an interactive R course. We will use a great learning system called Swirl http://swirlstats.com/. Mysteriously, that website has been down for the past few days… if it remains down, then you can access the content via the swirl github repository or via an internet archive such as the Wayback machine. If you are new to R, then the archived version of the full site might be a bit friendlier since it gives instructions on installing R and RStudio to get started (via the Learn tab).

Once you have R and RStudio installed, please install Swirl, start it, and follow the instructions to install the ‘R programming E’ course. We would like you to complete Lessons 1-9 and 15 in this online course, before Sept 22 when our course begins. Please take and save screen shots at the end of each lesson to document that you have completed the exercises. Feel free to explore further, with this course or any of the huge variety of other courses offered within Swirl. Please let us know if you have any difficulties with the install.

Schedule

The course sessions will be held Sept 14th and 17th in the LaKretz Garden Pavilion 101 from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM. The days will be divided into lectures in the morning and lab sessions in the afternoon. The afternoon sessions will be supported by current EEB grad students and postdocs, and they are intended to be a supportive and friendly way to get your questions answered.

The purpose of the bootcamp is to get you up and running with R, and to teach you some basic programming. We don’t expect any background knowledge (beyond what you learn from the assigned prep work), and we are not evaluating or judging you. It will be a supportive and inclusive environment, with the sole purpose of giving you a boost in your graduate work. We will ask you to complete and submit some exercises, since this is very much a ‘learn by doing’ topic, but we are not assigning letter grades.

Tuesday 14th September

  • 9:00AM - 9:15AM Introduction to R and Overview of Course Pinter-Wollman
  • 9:15-10:30 Introduction Basic Statistics and Plotting in R slides Pinter-Wollman
  • 10:30AM - 12:00PM Flow control, scripts, functions Alfaro slides
  • 1:00 - 4:00:PM Problem set session

Friday 17th September

Datasets

for Alfaro’s section

Miscellany