With the help of 2 R-Ninja Eighth Graders, Tara and Ben who have been R-ing since they were 5th graders, I recently taught Coding in R: Information Visualized class (Feb 23rd - March 2019) to Middle Graders (Grades 6-8) for Saturday Academy, a non-profit organisation. We donated all proceeds from teaching the class to Family Dog Shelter, Portland, OR and Oregon Humane Society, Portland, OR, and we will continue to R for Paws by donating all proceeds from teaching R to animal shelters.

Teaching R to 5th graders-Middle Schoolers during the weekend has been both enlightening and humbling.
Enlightening because kids understand data with context far better than adults; perhaps because they are not encumbered by the Big Data noise and always prefer visualization over text. I’ve learned to work within the limits of their attention span (so lots of breaks) and interest, cultivating a continuous learning environment versus a competitive one, a “We” versus an “I” approach, and…