Establishing a framework for development of Shiny Apps for teaching
Prof. Dr. Christina Bogner with Andreas Bolten
Geography - Ecosystem research
Idea
Shiny apps written in R (https://shiny.rstudio.com/) are interactive web apps. They can be used to teach e.g., statistics (https://stattlc.com/2021/08/17/ooh-shiny-r-shiny-apps-as-a-teaching-tool/) to beginners or for serious applications like reporting about systematic literature search according to PRISMA (https://estech.shinyapps.io/prisma_flowdiagram/.) We suggest (i) developing shiny apps for teaching within the KPA and (ii) creating teaching material that can serve to teach students to program such apps themselves. In order to deploy Shiny apps, a Shiny server is needed. To setup it, we kindly request the assistance of the KPA and in particular from Dr. Katja Sperveslage.
Result
A few apps for data visualization were designed in the programming language R. These apps help students understand different types of diagrams and provide an introduction to R as a data visualization tool. These apps were ported to the Shiny Server at imfesshub.uni-koeln.de and are accessible there.
Jason Poppel and Lennard Echstenkämper created the apps, added several data sets, and used program libraries such as ggplot2.
In the future, additional apps will be developed, with a focus on hypothesis testing, linear regression, confidence intervals, and bootstrapping. The apps will be embedded in a larger didactic process, such as homework assignments and teaching Shiny app programming via Shiny apps.