Need to check with Gabriella if the post-course survey link is correct (they usually use a custom one for their training).

General suggestions for lesson content delivery

Like we discussed, due to time constraints some bits of the materials we tend to
not demonstrate "interactively", but rather show and explain them using the
materials page, or if time really is tight, just mention where they exist in the
materials for those interested.

A lot of it is about improvising, depending on the feedback of learners we might
need to go through something again, or go slower, or faster... Different trainers
also go slower, or faster.

Spreadsheets

I'll do this lesson, so you can see how it goes...

OpenRefine

We usually cover the whole lesson.

The only thing we want to ensure is that most (if not all) of it is finished in the
morning, so we have plenty of time for R. So, as time runs out, we might not do all of
the proposed challenges.

R lessons

Before we start

We usually explain why R is useful for reproducibility, then open R studio and
present the interface.

Then we discuss a bit about the working directory (and use
the chance to emphasise how it's good to have a tidy directory structure) and
set the project to the course materials folder.

And that's pretty much it. The materials have a lot of extra details, e.g. about
help, function arguments, etc.
We cover these things as we're going through the introduction.

Intro to R

Here we pretty much follow the materials. At the very beginning we put some code
directly on the console. Then we explain actually the code is "lost", so it's best
to write code in the script. Then describe the "Ctrl + Enter" shortcut to run
code from the script to the console.

TIP: when presenting the round() function, do not use a number with .5,
otherwise we will descend into hell of how R rounds numbers. E.g. round(3.15, 1)
and round(3.151, 1) return different results (at least on my machine)

Starting with data

We follow the materials closely at the beginning.

The section on factors people usually struggle... they don't see the point of
why we're talking about it. So we tend to simplify it a bit and mention that
it is really useful for changing the order of characters in graphs for example,
from the alphabetical default.

We don't tend to do challenge 17.

And we usually skip the formatting dates,
unless there is time at the end of the dplyr section (usually there isn't).
This is one of those sections that we show it's in the materials for those interested
in working with dates.

Manipulating data frames

We used to cover all of this, until they recently introduced "spread" and "gather".
We'll have to see if there's time to cover this.

Again, depending on how the time is progressing, we might shorten some of the
challenges a bit.

It's essential to do the last section on exporting data, since that is used for
the plotting.

Visualising data

We cover all of this up to (and including) the faceting.

After that we usually don't do the customization interactively (it's a lot of
typing!) and instead show the course page with the further examples of how
everything can be customized.

If there is time, people can play around with customising their plots, and we can
go around the room answering peoples queries. If someone asks a question about
how to customise something, we might demonstrate it interactively to everyone.

Often I think it's useful when people ask for "how do you change X in the plot?"
to show that web-search is often the most efficient.

R and SQL

We're usually really running out of time when we get here (and people are tired
too).

So, we give a very brief (non-technical) explanation of what a database is, basically
thinking of it like a collection of tables that have some relationship between them.
For example, medical data about children, which would be on a table, and medical data on
their parents, which would be on another table. These two tables could be related to
each other based on the parent's names.

Then explain there is a specific language, SQL, used for interacting with databases.
We will not cover this specific language in the course, but instead use dplyr
functions that can do this for us.

I would then prioritize covering steps up to (including) "laziness" (perhaps
skipping, or just briefly mention, the SQL translation).

The other two sections, "Complex database queries" and "Creating db" might have to
just be shown from the course page itself. The cartoon with the joins is worth
showing, because it is well illustrated.

Hugo - the Day 1 & Day 2 areas Markdown code does not get rendered.
If edit on web then preview changes show rendered fine.
Cloned repo onto my mac and looked at index.md with MacDown and it displayed fine.
Think it must be jeckyll-realted i.e. when it generates the static page?