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Some years ago, I started experimenting with the computing language R. I have to confess that I don’t feel fully comfortable with its syntax, which I find particularly difficult. But I forced myself to get used to it. Why? My main reasons were two: knitr and shiny.

• Knitr is the perfect tool for literate computing. It allows the user to input a combination of code and markdown text providing a clean, human-readable document as output. Indeed, I’m using knitr for writing parts of this website (for example, the dissemination section).
• Shiny is great for making interactive apps, and publishing them as easy-to-use webpages.

For more (and certainly better) information… just google some tutorials. In this short entry, I only want to show an example of what shiny can do (and see how good it works with my new blog).

Take a look at the following simulation I made some years ago to teach some basic ideas about statistical inference:

The steps followed were:

1. Write the app itself. Of course, this is the difficult part.
2. Publish it. The easiest way is uploading it to ShinyApps. The most popular R editor, RStudio, can do this almost automatically.
3. Once this two steps are made, the insertion code I’ve used is as simple as:

<iframe src="https://pabrod.shinyapps.io/shiny/" style="border: 2px solid black; width: 100%; height: 1000px;"></iframe>

I’m a big fan of simulation and interactive teaching. More apps will be published soon. Some of them can be previewed in GeoGebraTube.

This entry appears in R-bloggers.com