Workshops for Women and Girls

R Foundation taskforce on women and other under-represented groups.

Overview

Thanks to generous funding from the R Consortium, Forwards is pleased to offer the following workshops to support the development of coding skills and increase the participation of women in the R community:

• Workshops for women are designed for women with some R coding experience who wish to learn more about package development, thereby addressing the skills gap that exists within the R community. As of 2016, an analysis of CRAN package maintainers estimated that fewer than 15% were women, and a useR! participant survey found that women were less likely than men to have experience contributing to or writing packages. Workshop participants learn to make code into an R package, do collaborative coding with GitHub, write a vignette or an article, build a package web page, and submit a package to CRAN. Participants can bring their own code that they wish to develop into a package or work with a Forwards example.

• Workshops for high school girls serve as an introduction to coding in R and are designed for students interested in STEM, coding, and data analysis. Participants learn about plotting data, web scraping, and the development of Shiny apps. A selection of topics related to contemporary current affairs are used, and where possible, incorporate data specific to the workshop’s geographic location.

Past Workshops

• Package development workshop for women & other underrepresented groups at the University York
  2020-01-07, York, UK
  Free to attend, travel scholarships available for travel within the UK. More details.
  Instructors: Emma Rand, Susannah Cowtan

• Forwards and ACEMS R Coding Workshop for Year 11 Girls at River City Labs
  2019-03-30, Brisbane, Australia
  Free to attend, More details
  Instructors: Di Cook and a team of brilliant young women

• Develop Packages in R at UCD O’Brien Centre for Science
  2019-04-06, Dublin, Ireland
  There is a small charge of EUR 5.85 to cover training materials, however tea/coffee and lunch are provided.
  Book your ticket
  Instructors: Isabella Gollini, assisted by Bruna Wundervald, Chiara Cotroneo, and Jo Niec.

• Women’s Package Development Workshop jointed hosted with R-Ladies Chicago
  2019-02-23 Chicago, USA
  Instructor: Stephanie Kirmer and Angela Li

• Data Science in R: Coding Workshop for 11th and 12th Grade Girls at AT&T NYC Data Science Research Center
  2018-10-27 New York City, USA
  Instructors: Emily Dodwell and Joyce Robbins

• Upgrade Your Workflow with a Custom Package at Cardiff satRday
  2018-06-23 Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
  Instructor: Heather Turner

• Package Development Workshop for Women: Everything you need to know to create your own R package at R Ladies Melbourne by Earo Wang, slides, code 2018-05-24 Melbourne, Australia

• Package Development Workshop for Women at eRum 2018
  2018-05-14 Budapest, Hungary
  Instructors: Heather Turner and Isabella Gollini

• Coding Workshop for 12th Grade Girls at The University of Auckland
  2017-12-08 Auckland, New Zealand
  Instructor: Di Cook

• Women’s Coding Workshop at The University of Auckland
  2017-12-07 Auckland, New Zealand
  Instructors: Jenny Bryan, Di Cook, and Hadley Wickham

• Coding Workshop for 11th Grade Girls at Kathleen Syme Library
  2017-10-28 Melbourne, Australia
  Instructor: Di Cook

Code of Conduct

Workshop instructors and participants agree to adhere to the R Consortium and R Community Code of Conduct.

Computing Information

If possible, please install the most recent versions of the following software on your laptop prior to the workshop:

• R 3.5.1 “Feather Spray” (release date 2018-07-02)
• RStudio Desktop 1.1.456 (release date 2018-07-19)

If you have trouble, there will be technical support prior to the start of the workshop (arrive 30 minutes early).

Workshop Materials

Workshop materials are available on GitHub under a CC-BY-NC 3.0 license.