WI Fast Stats overview

• WI Fast Stats is the first and only dedicated tool tailored at WI Fast Plants data and educational objectives
• WI Fast Stats is an integrated animated web page with a collection of R-developed web apps that provide Data Visualization and Data Analysis tools for WI Fast Plants data
• WI Fast Stats is a user-friendly easy-to-use interface that will render Data Science accessible to K-16 teachers and students currently using WI Fast Plants lesson plans
• Users do not need to have strong programming or mathematical background to use WI Fast Stats
• The web apps are simple to use, well documented, and freely available!

Usage

• WI Fast Stats is browser-based, and thus, no installation is needed
• Users simply need to click on any of the following links
  • WI Fast Stats: Integrated web page with access to all available web apps
  • Specific web apps: Each web app is tailored at a specific WI Fast Plants dataset and webinar. Currently, we have implemented web apps for the following webinars:
    • August 2020: New WI Fast Plants polycot selection data
    • December 2020: Hands-on WI Fast Plants study on ecosystem

More details are available in the documentation: DOCS.md

Source Code

WI Fast Stats is an open source project, and the source code is available at in this repository with the following structure:

• figures: Folder containing images needed in the DOCS.md file
• ms: Manuscript describing the website in the JOSS format
• notebooks: R markdown files with some of the main functions implemented in the web apps
• shiny-apps: R code corresponding to the web apps separated by webinar. We followed the structure of standard shiny apps and the main files are ui.R and server.R
• slides: Slides corresponding to the Data Science part of the WI Fast Plants webinars, also accessible through the website and web apps links
• website: HTML and CSS code for the main website

Running the web apps locally

Users with strong programming skills might like to modify the existing R code and run a version of the web apps locally.

1. The first step is to download the code. You can do this with git:

git clone https://github.com/crsl4/fast-stats.git

or download and extract a compressed zip file with the latest revision of the repository from here.

2. Make sure you have the dependencies installed. You can use the following command in R to install all the package dependencies:

list.of.packages <- c(
  "shiny", 
  "shinydashboard", 
  "shinyjs", 
  "plotly", 
  "data.table", 
  "ggplot2", 
  "RColorBrewer", 
  "car", 
  "pracma", 
  "ggplotify", 
  "viridis",
  "rsconnect")
new.packages <- list.of.packages[!(list.of.packages %in% installed.packages()[, "Package"])]
if(length(new.packages)) install.packages(new.packages)
install.github(“https://github.com/EdwinTh/thatssorandom")

3. Within R, you can run the web app with the following command:

shiny::runApp("path-to/fast-stats/shiny-app/webinar-aug20")

where path-to corresponds to the location where the fast-stats folder was cloned. You can change webinar-aug20 to webinar-dec20 or webinar-bio152 to run the other web apps.

Contributions

Users interested in expanding functionalities in WI Fast Stats are welcome to do so. See details on how to contribute in CONTRIBUTING.md

License

WI Fast Stats is licensed under the MIT licence. © Claudia Solis-Lemus (2020)

Citation

If you use the WI Fast Stats website or web apps in your work, we ask that you cite the following paper:

@misc{liu2020wi,
      title={WI Fast Stats: a collection of web apps for the visualization and analysis of WI Fast Plants data}, 
      author={Yizhou Liu and Claudia Solis-Lemus},
      year={2020},
      eprint={2012.03290},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={q-bio.OT}
}

Feedback, issues and questions

• Join the Google user group for general questions about the WI Fast Stats website and web apps
• Issues reports are encouraged through the GitHub issue tracker
• Feedback is always welcome via the following google form

Previous WI Fast Stats Version

On August 2020, we deployed a preliminary version of the cotelydon web app on shinyapps.io for the WI Fast Plants webinar. This web app is no longer maintained. Users can find the code for this simple web app in the simple-app branch in this repository and the tagged v1.0 version here. Also, the preliminary web app can be found in this link: https://wi-fast-stats.shinyapps.io/webinar-aug20/. Users are warned that this web app is not maintained anymore, and there are data upload errors when data exceeds a certain (unknown) size.