Using Mathlink Cubes to Introduce Data Wrangling with Examples in R
Human-Computer Interaction
2025-03-24 v2 Applications
Computation
Other Statistics
Abstract
This paper explores an innovative approach to teaching data wrangling skills to students through hands-on activities before transitioning to coding. Data wrangling, a critical aspect of data analysis, involves cleaning, transforming, and restructuring data. We introduce the use of a physical tool, mathlink cubes, to facilitate a tangible understanding of data sets. This approach helps students grasp the concepts of data wrangling before implementing them in coding languages such as R. We detail a classroom activity that includes hands-on tasks paralleling common data wrangling processes such as filtering, selecting, and mutating, followed by their coding equivalents using R's `dplyr` package.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2402.07029,
title = {Using Mathlink Cubes to Introduce Data Wrangling with Examples in R},
author = {Lucy D'Agostino McGowan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.07029},
year = {2025}
}