Learning a Language (with student comments in quotes)

This class is very much about learning a new language, whether you think of that language as R or statistical modeling. This class provides a place outside of the computer-science department for people to build up their confidence with programming even if they have never done it before:

"Being introduced to a foreign language, for all sense and purposes of it, was incredibly eye opening and forced me to try new and different methods of learning. I have used google more times than I would like to admit to try and find an answer to error outputs. I have become desensitized to getting codes wrong and am learning to understand that trying new things is not bad and that often times there are many ways to get to the same result. Having to find my own data was refreshing and allowed me to pursue my own interests throughout the course."

"Actually understanding code and how data analysis works! I've taken a wide variety of classes at Grinnell, but the computer sciences material is a little harder to break into because instead of being able to take the one intro class, you generally need to take that and another Comp Sci class on top of it to learn how to do the sort of coding that has real life applications, which I never had time for. As a result, this class provided a lot to me in terms of understanding how to approach learning about coding in the first place."

Back to What you Learn, back to Longitudinal & Time Series Analysis, or back to In the Classroom.