Socratic Swirl

Socraticswirl lets instructors of the R programming language offer in-class, interactive programming exercises, while letting the instructors view student answers and progress in real-time. (For the instructor version, see here).

For students

To install the package, copy and paste the following into your R terminal:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("dgrtwo/rparse")
devtools::install_github("dimagor/socraticswirl", ref="socraticswirl")

Socraticswirl may not work with newer version of testthat, so you may need to install the version we know that will works:

require(devtools)
install_version("testthat", version = "0.11.0", repos = "http://cran.us.r-project.org")

Your instructor will provide you the application key, REST API key and instructor ID. Then, you need to initialize the SocraticSwirl software once in R or RStudio. Suppose you already have the application key, api key and id,

appkey <- “cut-and-paste your application key”
apikey <- “cut-and-paste your api key”
id <- “your student id”
instructor <- “your instructor’s id”

To initialize your copy of SocraticSwirl, please type:

library(socraticswirl)
socratic_swirl_init(id, appkey, apikey, instructor)

You should see "Initialization completed.", which indicates the initialization process succeeded. You only need to initialize Socraticswirl once for each computer account, as long as the keys and the instructor are not changed. However, if you are using a shared computer account (i.e. several people share the same account, which is rare but could happen), it is possible that you may need to initialize Socraticswirl again, as others may also initialize the software of this shared account after your previous use.

Your instructor will also give you a line of code to run within your R terminal, which will register your SocraticSwirl session so that it knows what course and lesson you are taking and who your instructor is. With course_name, lesson_name and your_id you already have, it will look something like this:

library(socraticswirl)
socratic_swirl(course_name, lesson_name, your_id)

After that, you can take any individual exercise, whenever the instructor prompts you, with a single line of R code. To take the first exercise in a lesson, do:

exercise(1)

To take the third exercise, you would do:

exercise(3)

Or, you may take all exercises by:

start()

It's that simple!

LICENSE

Socraticswirl is a fork of the Swirl package. It is released under the GPL-3 license.