Activities developed to introduce middle or high school students to programming, as well as data analysis and oceanography, using an example with waves generated in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's wave tank. You will need to download R and RStudio, both are free.
For those not familiar with GitHub, the best way to get started with this material is to navigate to the Outreach_CodingAndWaves folder, then click on the green button "Clone or download" to the right of the screen, then "Download ZIP". This will download all the files and folders to your computer. The zipped package is ~310 MB and will take a few minutes to download.
Instructors, teachers or students wanting to use the activities provided are encouraged to read Coding Activities - Instructor Information. Very little to no prior knowledge of R is assumed, but troubleshooting various issues will become easier with experience. Lines starting with # are comments, text colors have meaning, and exact syntax is crucial. Typos or being in the wrong directory are usually responsible for most errors when starting.
General Instructions for Coding Activities apply to every activity and can be printed once for each group of students. Some activities include Powerpoint presentations that were created by Helen Yip to guide students through the activities. A final presentation given by students at the Ocean Discovery Institute is also included.
Code was developed by Jessica C. Garwood ([email protected]) - efforts were made to respect best coding standards, but you may find exceptions :)
Many thanks to Helen Yip from the Ocean Discovery Institute in San Diego for her valuable feedback and for being the motivation behind this outreach, as well as Derek J Grimes, Stephen Holleman, Nick Pizzo, and Bia Villas Boas, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (UCSD) for wave tank demos and generating the data.