Session 1: Welcome, Recap & Tooling Upgrade

Author
Affiliation

Claudius Gräbner-Radkowitsch

EUF and JKU

Published

12 03 2026

Modified

10 03 2026

Note

Date: Thursday, 12 March 2026, 16:00–19:00

Learning goals

  • Understand course structure, expectations, and assessment
  • Refresh key R and Quarto skills from the prior course
  • Set up a clean, reproducible project workflow (.Rproj, relative paths, folder structure)
  • Upgrade Quarto skills: YAML front matter, multiple output formats, bibliography with BibTeX
  • Understand the basics of Git version control via the RStudio Git pane
Important

All questions should be posted on the dedicated discussion page. This allows all students to benefit from responses and allows you to help each other. I do not answer questions via email.

Session outline

Time Activity
16:00–16:20 Welcome, course overview, assessment
16:20–17:00 Quarto upgrade walkthrough + live demo
17:00–17:15 Git orientation
17:15–18:15 Student exercise
18:15–19:00 Introduce Take-home Task 1, Q&A

Materials

File Description
Slides Lecture slides — open in browser, press F for fullscreen
Lecture notes Live coding document built during the session; use as a model for your own reports
Exercise sheet In-session exercise — setting up a reproducible Quarto workflow
Exemplary solution Exemplary solution to the in-session exercise
References BibTeX file with all citations used in session materials

Forking gives you a personal copy of all course materials that you can edit, save, and use freely at home. Do this once at the start of the course.

  1. Go to the course material repository and click Fork (top-right corner)
  2. GitHub creates a copy under your own account — this is yours
  3. Open a Codespace from your fork: Code → Codespaces → Create codespace on main
  4. The environment is identical to the shared one; you can commit and save your work freely

When new session materials are added, click Sync fork on your fork’s GitHub page, then Pull in the RStudio Git pane to receive the updates.

Here is the link to the demo assignment in Github classroom.

Remember: there is no submit button, your last commit before the deadline automatically counts as submission.

Here is the link to the demo assignment in Github classroom.

Remember: there is no submit button, your last commit before the deadline automatically counts as submission.

The demo document and exercise sheet have a </> Code button in the top-right corner. Click it and select “View Source” to see the raw .qmd file. Copy the full text, paste it into a new file in RStudio, and save it with a .qmd extension — you now have a fully working local copy.

Option A (recommended): Open the slides in Chrome or Edge, click ☰ (bottom-left) → Tools → PDF Export Mode, then File → Print → Save as PDF.

Option B: Add ?print-pdf to the end of the URL, then File → Print → Save as PDF. Enable “Background graphics” in the print options for correct styling.

Recap exercises

  • Browse the previous course and make sure you understand the content on linear regression (especially session 10)
  • After registering at GitHub, do the following two exercises of the First day on GitHub section:1
    • Introduction to GitHub
    • Commmunicate using Markdown
  • Check out the discussion space on the GitHub material repository and write a short post (such as a self-introduction) into the General space

Take-home task 1

Assigned at the end of this session. See the dedicated task page for full instructions, materials, and the GitHub Classroom link.

Footnotes

  1. For further readings see the Github Quickstart Guide.↩︎