Lesson plan

If delivered as a semester-long course, we suggest the following lesson plan.

Week 1

Before class:

In class:

Week 2

Before class:

In class:

  • Questions about reproducible reports
  • Questions about loading data
  • Questions about the pipe and renaming
  • In-class exercises - click to download .qmd

Week 3

Before class:

In class:

Week 4

Before class:

In class:

Week 5

Before class:

In class:

Week 6

Before class:

In class:

  • Questions about structuring projects
  • Questions about data types
  • Overview of assignment 1 (wrangling)
  • In-class exercises - click to download .qmd

Week 7

Before class:

In class:

Week 8

Before class:

In class:

  • Questions about reshaping and pivots

Week 9

Before class:

In class:

  • Questions about binding and joining
  • Questions about sharing and privacy
  • Lecture and exercise: Intro to GitHub, diffs

Week 10

Before class:

  • Dattani, S. (2025) Saloni’s guide to data visualization. https://www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-guide-to-data-visualization
  • Saloni’s data visualizations while working at Our World In Data: https://ourworldindata.org/team/saloni-dattani

In class:

  • Lecture: Principles of visualization
  • In this course, this is often a guest lecture by Dr. Saloni Dattani.
    • Founding editor of Works in Progress
    • See her TED talk here
    • Her podcast, Hard Drugs, is a show about “medical innovation, how to speed it up, how to scale it up, and how to make sure lifesaving tools reach the people who need them the most”.

Week 11

Before class:

In class:

  • Questions about reporting
  • Questions about ggplot2 for visualization
  • Overview of assignment 2 (plotting)

Week 12

Before class:

In class:

  • Questions about the linear model
  • Questions about the assignments

Week 13 + 14

Oral examinations