Week 1 Live Session (Fall 2026)

In this first session of the fall 2026 cohort, we introduced ourselves, showed how we built a survey report with R and Quarto, and walked through how a week in R in 3 Months works. We also answered getting-started questions about file organization, RStudio versus Positron, and project data, and talked about how to approach AI while learning.

You'll learn:

• How a Quarto document combines code and text so a report or slide deck updates automatically when the underlying data changes
• How the weekly cycle works: lessons and project assignment before Thursday, then live session, coworking, and coaching feedback
• How to choose a project dataset, and why to clean data in R instead of in an external tool so the work is reproducible
• How to organize project files, with raw data and cleaned data in separate subfolders inside a single project
• Why to write most of your own code in the first half of the course before relying on AI

Resources mentioned:

• Quarto
• Positron
• RStudio
• {tidyverse}
• {googlesheets4}
• {sf}
• {dplyr}

Key moments:

• 12:55 Map of where cohort participants are located
• 15:46 How the survey report was built with R and Quarto
• 17:37 Re-rendering the slides to update charts automatically
• 23:15 Question: does this work with Microsoft Forms and Excel?
• 24:33 Question: do you type all the code yourself?
• 30:48 Weekly project assignments and feedback
• 36:03 Weekly overview: flipped format, live sessions, coworking
• 41:09 Choosing project datasets and privacy considerations
• 45:54 Question: where to save files, Discord blocked at work, RStudio versus Positron
• 50:22 Question: should you clean data before using R?
• 51:43 Question: separating data files from code within a project
• 53:17 AI and learning R