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Shiny Tutorials for Statistics Instructors

This repository contains the source code for a MOSAIC Project tutorial. It is intended for statistics instructors who would like to write their own Shiny apps for classroom use.

Overview

Shiny makes it easy for R users to develop responsive, R-powered web applications. As you probably know, either from your own initial forays into Shiny or from the Shiny Tutorial, creating simple apps is no problem, and probably you have some ideas for teaching apps that could be written using just the tools developed in the Tutorial.

But some teaching apps appear to be quite complex. Consider, for example, this app which aims to introduce the student to the Chi-Square Test for Goodness of Fit. The app takes the user through a simulation process, keeping track of the results of simulations as they accumulate, permitting the viewer to consider the results from several points of view, and allowing the viewer to start over, perhaps with new data.

The aim of this tutorial is to take you step-by-step through the construction of a reasonably full-featured simulation app that lets students explore, through simulation, the coverage properties of the classical t-intervals for a population mean. After completing the tutorial you will be able to write your own simulation apps---hopefully having been spared some of the struggle that I went through when I first learned Shiny in the Spring of 2014.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes that you have:

  • familiarity with R. We'll assume some basic facility in R programming and that you can at least read and understand R code that creates custom plots in R's base graphics system. For the most part our explanation of R code will be limited to its relationship to app-building.
  • an introductory knowledge of Shiny. All necessary prerequisites in this area can be acquired by watching Garret Grolemund's excellent three-part webinar on How to Start with Shiny. (See R Studio's webinars page.)

How to View the Tutorial

Online

For the benefit of rstudio::conf 2020 participants and for a limited time, the app is again online at:

https://homer.shinyapps.io/simTutorials

Locally

You can also run the tutorial on your own machine. Make sure you have the following packages installed:

install.packages(c("shiny", "scales", "readthedown"))

If you are a user of Git, then:

  • Clone this repo into your computer (or fork onto your GitHub account and then clone).
  • In the cloned repo, open the directory sim_tutorial_Rmd and find the file tutorial_sim.Rmd.
  • Open the file and run it. (It runs as a local shiny app.)
  • Enjoy!

If you don't use Git, then:

  • Download this repo as a zipped file using the Download Zip button on the right above.
  • Extract the repo into a directory of your own choosing.
  • Open RStudio, open the directory sim_tutorial_Rmd and find the file tutorial_sim.Rmd.
  • Open the file and run it. (It runs as a local shiny app.)
  • Enjoy!