A guide to the Adventr package

Andy Field

2020-05-01

Overview

The adventr package contains a series of interactive tutorials that teach R alongside chapters of my 2016 textbook An Adventure in Statistics: the reality enigma. The tutorials are written using a package called learnr. Once a tutorial is running it’s a bit like reading a book but with places where you can practice the R code that you have just been taught. The adventr package is free (as are all things R-related) and offered to support tutors and students using my textbook who want to learn R.

These tutorials contain abridged sections from my books so there are some copyright considerations but I offer them under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, 1

Contents of adventr

The package was written initially to support my own teaching on a module where I base the content around An Adventure in Statistics. One quirk of this is that there are some advanced tutorials on topics not covered in the book (but continue the themes of the book …). Another quirk is that - at present - there are some chapters that don’t have associated tutorials (for example, the Chapter on probability).

The tutorials are named to correspond (roughly) to the relevant chapter of the book. For example, adventr_03 would be a good tutorial to run alongside teaching related to chapter 3, and so on.

Running tutorials

To run a tutorial execute:

learnr::run_tutorial("name_of_tutorial", package = "adventr")

For example, to run the tutorial on data basics execute:

learnr::run_tutorial("adventr_02", package = "adventr")

Suggested workflow

The tutorials are self-contained (you practice code in code boxes) so you don’t need to use RStudio at the same time. However, to get the most from them I would recommend that you open two RStudio sessions (i.e. two RStudio windows running simultaneously). Use one RStudio session to run the tutorial. You won’t then be able to use this RStudio window (because its resources are allocated to the tutorial). In the second RStudio session try replicating what you learn in the tutorial. That is, open a new script file and everything you do in the tutorial, practice in the script file (and save it). This workflow has the advantage of not just teaching you the code that you need to do certain things, but also provides practice in using RStudio itself.


  1. Basically you can use it for teaching and non-profit activities but not meddle with it or claim it as your own work.