/r_concepts

Doodles relating to a future Exercism R learning syllabus

Primary LanguageR

R concept playground

The R track on Exercism currently lacks a Learning Syllabus, designed to lead novices to the language through a sequence of key concepts. Implementing this has been a low priority until now, but this repo is an attempt to think about how it might one day look.

The first few PRs have (early July) been submitted to the Exercism/R repo. There is a long way to go!

One table of possible concepts is laid out in issue #198

Each concept has its own subdirectory under concepts/. There should eventually be 4 files in each:

  • introduction.md: provides a brief introduction to a student who has not yet completed the corresponding concept exercise.
  • about.md: provides more detailed information about the concept, for a student who has completed the corresponding concept exercise to learn from and refer back to.
  • links.json lists useful URLs.
  • .meta/config.json has some metadata.

Exercises illustrating and practicing each concept go under exercises/concept/, each in their own subdirectory. A minimal set of 8 files is:

  • {slug}.R is the stub file for the student to edit.
  • test_{slug}.R contains the test suite.
  • .docs/introduction.md teches the relevant concept(s). Typically just a copy of the introduction.md file under each concept.
  • .docs/instructions.md briefly lists steps needed to complete this exercise.
  • .docs/hints.md is to help a student get unstuck (can be empty).
  • .meta/exemplar.R is a working implementation, hidden from the student but used to validate the tests.
  • .meta/design.md notes decisions that led to the current version of the exercise.
  • .meta/config.json is metadata needed by the website.

Progress in implementing things is tracked on Google sheets. There are separate tabs, listing

  • concepts for R
  • concept exercises for R
  • multiple tabs on concept exercises used by other tracks implementing a learning mode

Don't over-interpret the cells with a green background, claiming a file is done! That only means there is a reasonable amount of first-draft content, not that it is done well.

Ones maked as "merged" are more credible, but still not live on the website.

A flow diagram showing how everything fits together is work in progress. See flowchart.md for a Mermaid version.