README.md

In elb0/myStarship: Creates Data About A Unique Starship

myStarship

The goal of myStarship is to give each student a unique dataset for an assessment about linear mixed models. This is still a work in progress and I have not yet trialled it with students.

Image source: Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum

Installation

You can install this package from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("elb0/myStarship")

Example

This package assumes students have a numeric ID that is 8, 9 or 10 digits long, no letters or special characters.

get_my_starship() creates two objects in the global environment.

1) ship_name is a character vector with the ship’s name. It has the form “SS _____” where the blank is a randomly generated nonsense word. 2) personnel_data is a randomly generated dataset with information about the crew of the ship.

The same ship and crew will be generated as long as the same ID is used, even across different sessions and machines.

library(myStarship)
library(tidyverse)

get_my_starship(1000000098)

ship_name
#> [1] "SS Pleaplutz"

glimpse(personnel_data)
#> Rows: 3,012
#> Columns: 12
#> $ rank               <chr> "Captain", "Captain", "Captain", "Captain", "Capta…
#> $ position           <chr> "Captain", "Captain", "Captain", "Captain", "Capta…
#> $ division           <chr> "Command", "Command", "Command", "Command", "Comma…
#> $ sub_division       <chr> "Command", "Command", "Command", "Command", "Comma…
#> $ gender             <chr> "Masculine", "Masculine", "Masculine", "Masculine"…
#> $ name               <chr> "Christopher Padilla", "Christopher Padilla", "Chr…
#> $ duty_shift         <chr> "Alpha", "Alpha", "Alpha", "Alpha", "Alpha", "Alph…
#> $ shift_team         <chr> "Team 1", "Team 1", "Team 1", "Team 1", "Team 1", …
#> $ starfleet_gpa      <dbl> 6.99, 6.99, 6.99, 6.99, 6.99, 6.99, 6.99, 6.99, 6.…
#> $ perseverance_score <dbl> 7.83, 7.83, 7.83, 7.83, 7.83, 7.83, 7.83, 7.83, 7.…
#> $ week               <int> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 1, 2, 3, 4,…
#> $ productivity       <dbl> 28.87447, 30.85021, 30.55453, 30.06952, 32.65455, …

The ‘context’

This data is Star Trek ‘inspired’ but probably horrifically wrong to fans less ‘casual’ than me.

Draft preamble for students

You are the Chief Science Officer of the SS ____ (e.g. SS Pleaplutz). You have data about the productivity of the crew over a 12 week period after a shore leave (a holiday break for the crew). For each member of the crew you also have data on their rank within Starfleet, their role on the ship (position), which of the three main divisions (division) they are in (Command, Operations, Science), as well as their sub-division (sub_division, e.g. Engineering is a sub-division of Operations). You also know their gender (Feminine, Masculine, Non-binary), name, which duty shift (duty_shift) they are assigned to (there are four 8-hour shifts covering each 24 hour period, Alpha, Beta, Delta and Gamma), what team within that shift they are assigned to (shift_team, Team 1 to 6, or sometimes fewer), what their GPA upon graduating from Starfleet Academy was (starfleet_gpa, 0-10 scale, 10 being the best grade), their perseverance score (perseverance_score) from their most recent psych assessment (0-10 scale, 10 being high perseverance). week indicates the weeks since the shore leave (1 to 12) and their productivity score for each week is recorded.

Your goal is to better understand productivity aboard your ship.

Outstanding questions/ideas

• How to auto-grade assessments is still something I am working on, but very motivated to solve because I’d like to do this with my 600 third years.
  • I haven’t done this yet, but I think providing students with a personalized mark scheme should be pretty easy: at simplest, provide an .Rmd template that students can add their student ID to and knit, at most complicated, use a mail merge workflow.
• I’m still extremely new to making packages so there are probably soooo many ways to make this more light weight and not rely so heavily on the tidyverse…but this works well for my purposes.
• Originally, I’d thought about having the student provide their name as an input to the function and having them represented in the data, but then I also added gender, and I also didn’t want them to be miffed if they were randomly assigned a bad score for any of the numeric variables.
• I think there is still an eeny-weeny chance that a student will end up being the Science Officer on the SS [swear word], so I will be warning students that the names are auto-generated…

Credits

This idea was inspired from talking to Nathalie Moon about a University of Toronto Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Teaching and Learning Community of Practice talk she attended by Prof. Michael Reid, Adiv Paradise, Colleen Gilhuly and Emily Deibert over at the U of T David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The ‘initials’, ‘finals’ and ‘vowels’ components used to make starship names are pulled from the gibberish database: https://github.com/greghaskins/gibberish.

Thank you to my lovely sister, Meggie Bolton, for consulting on tailoring the gibberish word components and letting me tell her all about making this.

elb0/myStarship documentation built on Feb. 22, 2021, 4:01 a.m.