fiveMinuteStats

This repo is intended to contain short "vignettes" illustrating statistical concepts. It is very much work in progress. Things may change quickly and often...

The name comes from the fact that, in principle, each vignette should be readable in a short amount of time. Perhaps five minutes.

The overall goal is that by making vignettes short in this way we can try to make learning more "modular". Each vignette should, ideally, focus on introducing a single concept, or a small number of related concepts, that are easily digestable provided other pre-requisite concepts are mastered. One reason for this is to try to make learning easier: break complex ideas down into smaller more easily digestable chunks. Another is that it encourages re-use of material. Just as software engineers write software in a "modular" way, with each function performing a well-defined role, the idea is that these vignettes make learning "modular". If you don't like the way one vignette introduces the concept then you can write a different one and just replace that one part. And in principle if this takes off we can have large numbers of authors, each contributing a small number of vignettes. Modularizing facilitates sharing the load.
In principle we can have multiple vignettes for the same concept and users can choose which one they like.

The idea of breaking learning down into small chunks is kind of obvious, but I was personally inspired by watching videos with my kids: https://artofproblemsolving.com/videos/prealgebra Maybe we can make learning statistics this easy and this much fun? However, I decided against video because a) I'm not as funny as this guy, and b) it is harder to collaborate and update videos.

If you are interested in these ideas, please get in touch, mstephenskanga@roouchicago.edu (remove the marsupial).

For contributors

The repo is organized using John Blischak's workflowr R package. Each vignette is an R Markdown file, saved in the 'analysis' subdirectory. To add a vignette, run the following:

library("workflowr")
wflow_open("analysis/newfile.Rmd")

See the workflowr online documentation to learn more.