Reorder episodes

[vahtras]

The only changes in this commit is renaming the files in _episodes
so that the learning curve becomes more logical, with the basic
concepts in the beginning (for, if) rather than the end.

see also issue #162 on

#162

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[alee]

👍

[souravsingh]

LGTM. Need review from @ntmoore before merging, since this is a massive change.

[ntmoore]

Hi @vahtras, thanks for this suggestion. I am reluctant to assent to this change without further discussion. I have two concerns:

1. One of the ideas of the SWC lessons is that you should get to "useful stuff" early in the lesson so that participants "buy-in". To a novice, For loops and conditionals are possibly not perceived as "useful" as reading in tabular data and plotting (automating excel tasks...). I realize that this is COUNTER to how every programming book in the world orders the table of contents, but the SWC lessons are not programming books - they're tutorials that are meant to draw in possibly skeptical novices. In the current structure, loops and conditionals come after there's an obvious need for them. Feel free to disagree with me! I think though that the audience of SWC materials needs to be kept in mind.

2. Greg Wilson, @gvwilson, is the original author of this lesson and I think his input on a structural change like the one you're proposing is important.

Again, thanks for this suggestions. Right now, I think further discussion would be good.

[gvwilson]

Thanks for the PR @vahtras and for the ping @ntmoore - yes, the current order seems strange from a "fundamentals first" point of view, but as Guzdial and others have shown with their media-first computing research, introducing applications first is more engaging and produces higher retention. Many people who teach R (both for the Carpentries and in regular classrooms) use a similar approach: they start by loading data into data frames, doing straightforward statistical calculations, and plotting, and only then move on to things like if and for, and it seems to be more of a ramp and less of a cliff for many learners.

@inproceedings{Guzd2013,
  doi = {10.1145/2493394.2493397},
  year = {2013},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery ({ACM})},
  author = {Mark Guzdial},
  title = {Exploring Hypotheses about Media Computation},
  booktitle = {Proc.\ 2013 International Computing Education Research Conference ({ICER'13})}
}

[vahtras]

Thanks for your comments @gvwilson and @ntmoore ! As I saw this material used in a workshop by another instructor his reflection was also that the order of the sections was, well odd. Like having an advanced data structure like the dataframe before the simpler list.

I can relate to the fact that having an explicit example first and general principles later is better for learning. However, that is not what I saw here, my first impression of this material was rather that the order of the sections was somewhat accidental. And I thought reordering sections was a minor change, not a massive change.

But OK, I respect your reservations and we can leave it as is for now.