TA Training - STA199

Teaching Quarto

Dr. Elijah Meyer
Eli Gnesin

Duke University

2024-01-11

The WHAT and WHY

If you can articulate why we use Quarto, students are more likely to “buy in” and learn it!

• Reproduciability

• Collaboration

• Quarto supports many languages such as R, Python, Julia, etc.

Quarto vs R-Markdown

Rmarkdown:

knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = FALSE)  

Quarto:

title: "Project Title" 
execute:
  echo: false

Quarto: easier to get started and attempts to “smooth” the edges of R-markdown

Visual vs Source Tab

(a)

(b)

Figure 1: Source (a) vs Visual (b)

Quarto Layout

These are not obvious questions to those who have never coded before

– How to Render a document

– What is a YAML

– Where to write code

– Where to write text

“My Document won’t Render”

Throughout the semester, you will be asked a variety of Quarto questions from students.

We are going to practice:

– Identifying errors

– Fixing errors

– How we teach these fixes to students

Goal: Helping students become learners…. not fixing the errors for them

exercise1

Questions?

exercise2

Questions?

Other Common Mistakes

– Saving variables

– Overwriting variables / data sets

data <- data |>
  summarize(mean(col1))

– Missing |>

– == vs %in%

In Summary

Discovery

– Help students help themselves

– Show patience

– Use informative error messages