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Jay Campanell | A high school student’s journey to bring R into the classroom | Posit (2020)

My 8th-grade capstone project introduced me to R. The project was a data visualization about breakfast tacos. I used R and other web-based tools. My lightning talk will focus on my experience about using R for class projects and getting support from my parents to help integrate R into the classroom. I will show how students can get started when they don't know how to use R. I will talk about the project’s toolkit, which includes Posit Cloud, Google Sheets, Chromebook, measurement tools, my phone, and how R is being used in my school. A 5-minute presentation in our Lightning Talks series

Dec 3, 2020
4 min
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Transcript#

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.

So, my name is Jay Campanell, I'm a 9th grader at the Liberal Arts and Sciences Academy, and this is my story of how I started using R through a school project.

So I'm from Austin, Texas, and in Austin there are a lot of things that make us so Austin. And one of those things is our very passionate love towards tacos, and specifically breakfast tacos. We will constantly debate other people on who we think make the best breakfast tacos. So what if we could take a scientific approach to see who really makes the best breakfast tacos in Austin?

So my solution to this question was the taco index, which was a way of objectively reviewing the different tacos in Austin by measuring them on their total weight, their weight without their tortillas, and the thickness of their tortillas.

The capstone project origin

So like the procrastinator I am, I didn't start working on this until I absolutely had to, and that was my capstone project. The only criteria was that my project had to help the community in some way, and I thought the taco index did that perfectly.

So I started working on this as a book because it was inspired off the Shanghai Soup Dumpling Index that was a book, but the more I worked on that, the more I knew that that's not what I wanted to do. So I went to my mom and I asked her, what do you think I should do? And she told me to use R. So like the good son I am, I took her advice and used R. But I had very little idea on what R was and definitely not how to use it.

The only exposure I had gotten to it was tagging along to the cities where RStudio Conference was with my parents and the trip to Harry Potter World with unlimited butter beer and extremely overpriced wands. So I was confused. I didn't know what to do.

Getting started with R

So like every R programmer, I went to Google and I searched what I needed to do. So I searched, how do I put a Google sheet in R? And I clicked on one of the first links, copy-pasted the code, and then tweaked it until it worked for me. And eventually, I got a blank Google sheet into R, and I thought that was pretty impressive for myself.

So I had this blank Google sheet in, and now I just needed some data. So that's when we started going out and measuring the different tacos in Austin, specifically the Migas taco, because it was the breakfast taco of Austin. And we used tools like a scale and calipers to measure these tacos, which got many awkward and weird stares from other people. But we cut through the awkwardness, and eventually, we had our Google sheet full of data.

So this was a school project. And at my school, the only tools available to us are Chromebooks. And, of course, R and RStudio don't run on Chromebooks. So I had to work on this project through RStudio Cloud, and with the help of my mom and Google, we built the app up to where it is today.

The final product

So this is it. This is the final product, tacoindex.com. And we use the graph to compare the different tacos based on the five different key points, and you can click and compare the different tacos there. You can also click and see a map list and profiles and about page of all the different places and tacos that we tried.

So after completing this project, I no longer feel intimidated to just open R up and start working, and I've started to really enjoy it. But this project wouldn't have been anywhere as good as it was without the help and encouragement I got from my mom. So I hope all the parents here at least show their kids R, because maybe they'll love it as much as I do. And I'm excited to continue R in the future. Thank you very much.

So I hope all the parents here at least show their kids R, because maybe they'll love it as much as I do.