Focus Group Highlights

mechanics

’… going through this was super helpful because now I like understand the mechanics of it all.

‘And so I don’t have any intentions of like making formal geoms on my own for anything yet. But it was like really helpful for understanding how the whole system works.’

failure w/ previous attempts

‘So like there’s some other layer of getting into the ggplot extension world that I [was] missing.’

Step-by-step and including Step 0

’So pedagogically, I liked how it was. I like the general steps. Like start with … regular ggplot and Step 0 just to have like a baseline. And then going to each of the steps to get there and then being able to compare with the original. Like as far as like pedagogically, that was super helpful just as as an approach to get it right just so you can have a goal. And see how all of these different primitives and proto elements and whatever fit together.

Skepticism

It was that easy. And I felt empowered as a result of that…. But you know, like, my problem isn’t gonna be that easy.

Concern regarding missing values

A place where you might have an opportunity to do a little bit of pedagogical caution [is with] missing values. So when computing a mean like ggplot says, by the way, there were three rows I didn’t plot…. So then you need to explicitly override the default and that something like that so that people are not just blindly putting summaries down without considering the data that are being used to make them.

Accessibility for students

I’m teaching, so I’m teaching data visualization this summer online again with my regular like online classes I’ve assigning [the tutorial]… as kind of like an extra credit thing at the end of semester to saying like, if you’re interested, go through this thing and you get 10 bonus points or something just for the more advanced students that will be in the class that will be interested. But I think it’s totally accessible for them.

Higher level objectives

I’ll just add that I I think we, I could definitely use materials like this and it did raise for me the points since I didn’t have a lot of experience writing extensions before like it was ended up being very comprehensible to me and so it kind of made me think that in like a data visuals, data visualization classes that we teach, we probably need to. There’s a balance between teaching the students to use the tools that exist right now to like, just do your analysis and just do the best with the tools that are available. But we probably should include a couple of weeks on like. You know, programming and writing extensions along these lines, because it’s obviously like very powerful and they need to have at least some exposure to it. So you know, a week or two weeks of materials kind of like this would be helpful and would help distinguish them from like being able to just work through tutorials on your own online. Like, if they could write their own extension, that’s like real value added, you know, to their organization. So it it made me think that I need to think about my data visualization class A little bit more as a programming class in some ways. And I thought that would be a good. You know, this is pretty good material along those lines.

Relationship to writing functions

[A useful addition might be] trying to clarify a little bit more when it’s useful to have your own custom Geom, as opposed to your own function.