Are you teaching a class with RStudio or teaching yourself to code? Whether you’re teaching students or teaching yourself, one of the hardest parts of teaching data science is finding example datasets that are real, understandable, and manageable.
A Versatile Teaching Dataset
The Morrow Plots is the oldest agricultural experiment in North America – a field in the middle of the University of Illinois campus that has been planted and harvested every year since 1876.
Now it’s also an R package called morrowplots. The data, help documentation, and pre-made learning activities are all conveniently bundled into an R package you can easily import into RStudio with just one line of code.
This R package is a special project from the Illinois Research Data Service and the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences. The dataset showcases the value of data curation, documentation, and preservation, and the R package makes this unique historical dataset easily accessible to data science students everywhere.
Pre-made lesson plans
The morrowplots package comes with 3 lesson plans complete with step-by-step instructions and sample R code to walk you through:
- The history of the experiment
- Creating a variety of data visualizations that reveal trends over time
- How to compare this data to national data from the USDA
How to get it
Download the morrowplots package from CRAN or GitHub or install it into RStudio with the code below.
What if I’m not using R?
No problem. Download the dataset directly from the Illinois Data Bank. The CSV file format is compatible with a wide range of analysis tools including Excel and Google Sheets.
All Data Nudges are licensed under CC BY 4.0. You are free to share, adopt, or adapt them and cite the Illinois Research Data Service.