Labs

Step-by-step walkthroughs you can run on your own machine. Labs are designed to be self-serve: read top to bottom, follow along, and verify each step on your own machine.

Scheduled Mon/Wed class times are reserved for required checkpoint conferences, optional demonstrations, troubleshooting, and open studio work. You can work through these labs on your own, or bring your in-progress work to one of the scheduled meetings in the MAC for help.

Available

  • Lab 1 — Install the stack (VS Code, R, Quarto, TinyTeX)
  • Lab 2 — First LaTeX math — write, render, and visually verify a short mathematical document in Quarto.
  • Lab 3 — Writing a Claim, Example, and Justification in Quarto — structure a short mathematical writeup with a setup, claim, example, and justification, then inspect for logic, not just formatting.
  • Lab 4 — Adding a Figure, Table, and Citation in Quarto — enrich a short technical document with a captioned figure, a small captioned table, a citation from a .bib file, and automatic cross-references, then inspect the PDF for apparatus problems.
  • Lab 5 — A tour of a tidy dataset in R — the first R-in-Quarto report: load and inspect mtcars, compute a few small summaries (with both the dplyr path and the base-R fallback path side by side), optionally add one small base-R plot, write a short interpretation paragraph, and render to PDF — the load → inspect → summarize → interpret → render → read habit applied to computed output.
  • Lab 6 — A ggplot2 walkthrough — the first ggplot inside a Quarto report: install ggplot2, inspect mtcars lightly, build the minimum-viable scatterplot (ggplot(data, aes(x, y)) + geom_point()), add axis labels with labs(), optionally map color to a categorical variable using factor(cyl), render the plot inside a PDF, and write one sentence of prose under the figure saying what it shows.
  • Lab 7 — A small reproducible simulation in R — the first reproducible simulation inside a Quarto report on a base-R-only coin-flip process: set a seed with set.seed(), generate 1000 simulated flips with sample(), summarize with table() and mean(), optionally visualize with barplot(table(...)), optionally extend with replicate() to see sampling behavior, render twice, and write one short interpretation paragraph that stays within what the simulation under the stated seed actually produced.
  • Lab 8 — Drafting and verifying technical prose with an AI assistant (Weeks 11–12) — the ask → record → verify → correct → disclose workflow on a small Quarto YAML rendering issue: ask an AI assistant of your choice (tool-agnostic; no paid tier required) about a deliberate YAML typo, summarize what the assistant says, verify the load-bearing claims against the Quarto reference and a re-render of the actual document, correct what needs correcting, and disclose with a three-line AI Use Note. The lab is shared across Weeks 11 (debugging audit prep) and 12 (drafting + critique prep).
  • Lab 9 — Organizing your portfolio folder (and an optional Git workflow) (Week 13) — audit your math-software-portfolio/ folder in place without restructuring it: open the whole folder, confirm source and rendered output are together, render-check one artifact, fix any absolute paths, and add a one-screen portfolio map (README) at the root. Then, optionally, put the folder under a lightweight local Git workflow (git init → git add → git commit → git log) — no branches, no remote, no GitHub required. The non-Git path is complete on its own.

Lab sequence complete

Lab numbering is rough — not every week has a paired lab. The lab sequence is complete with Lab 9; Weeks 14–15 are final portfolio assembly and reflection, supported by the Week 13 portfolio note and Lab 9 rather than by new labs.