If you’re like many people who have taken a course to learn R you found the course inspiring, albeit a bit overwhelming. The image of drinking from a fire hydrant comes to mind. Regardless, you leave the class excited to have a new tool in your belt. But then a few weeks pass and you haven’t used the concepts and you are sitting in front of a blank screen ready to make those plots for an important presentation.

You stare at the screen. The cursor keeps blinking. You’re running out of time. You go back to your old reliable tools and fire up Excel or Prism.

What went wrong?

You were asked to learn a foreign language in a short period of time with few opportunities to practice. You certainly didn’t have any opportunities to practice the material once the class was over.

Until now.

Starting this Fall, I will be hosting weekly virtual group programming sessions for 5 or 6 participants per group. In each of these 2-hour long sessions you will work with the rest of the group to regenerate a figure from example data using tools from the tidyverse.

These sessions will follow an “ensemble” or “mob” programming model. Each person will take turns writing the code (the “driver”) that another group member tells them to type (the “navigator”). The other participants will coach the navigator on what they should type. The primary rule is that the driver cannot type something that the navigator doesn’t tell them to type first. I will sit in the background making sure that everyone follows the rules and to help the group get through mental blocks. This format has been very successful in my lab meetings as we try to develop our own skills and learn different ways of doing the same thing.

The types of figures we’ll create will be like those I show in my newsletter, on my YouTube channel, and in the minimalR and generalR materials. Although you don’t need to be a tidyverse master, dplyr and ggplot shouldn’t be a totally foreign concept to you. Let me know if you’d like a group for novice or more advanced users.

Initially, each group will run for 5 weekly sessions. To start I will be running 3 groups: Tuesdays from 9 to 11 AM EST or 3 to 5 PM EST (10/1-10/29) and Fridays from 3 to 5 PM EST (9/27-10/25). I need to have 4-6 people register for each group for the group to happen. The cost will be $500 per participant for the full 5 sessions.

If you are interested, let me know which time slot would work best for you. Also, let me know where you feel like you are with your use of tools from the tidyverse.

Pat