Community & encouragement
A person in a cape that reads “code hero” who looks like they are flying through the air while typing on a computer while saying “I’m doing a think all on my own!” The coder’s arms and legs have ropes attached to two hot air balloons lifting them up, with labels on the balloons including “teachers”, “bloggers”, “friends”, “developers”. Below the code hero, several people carry a trampoline with labels “support” and “community” that will catch them if they fall

A person in a cape that reads “code hero” who looks like they are flying through the air while typing on a computer while saying “I’m doing a think all on my own!” The coder’s arms and legs have ropes attached to two hot air balloons lifting them up, with labels on the balloons including “teachers”, “bloggers”, “friends”, “developers”. Below the code hero, several people carry a trampoline with labels “support” and “community” that will catch them if they fall

Illustrated line plot of "How much I think I know about R" on the y-axis, and "Time" on the x-axis. Along the line are emoji-style faces, showing the non-linear progression of R knowledge over time. At first, a nervous face becomes a happy face early on in learning, then a "grimace" face at an intermediate peak before a steep decline (with an exhausted face at the local minimum). Then, a determined face charges back up a hill, reaching another peak with a "mind blown" face and text annotation "join R community on twitter" followed by another decline, but this time the faces look happy even though their "How much I think I know about R" value is declining.

A digital cartoon with two illustrations: the top shows the R-logo with a scary face, and a small scared little fuzzy monster holding up a white flag in surrender while under a dark storm cloud. The text above says “at first I was like…” The lower cartoon is a friendly, smiling R-logo jumping up to give a happy fuzzy monster a high-five under a smiling sun and next to colorful flowers. The text above the bottom illustration reads “but now it’s like…”

Two fuzzy monsters standing side-by-side outside of a door frame through which is a magical wonderland of different R communities, with a “mind blown” rainbow coming out of the one closest to the door. A welcome mat says “Welcome.”

Cute fuzzy monsters holding up signs that read “we believe in you.”

Header text "R learners" above five friendly monsters holding up signs that together read “we believe in you.”

Debugging & Feelings
A cartoon of a fuzzy round monster face showing 10 different emotions experienced during the process of debugging code. The progression goes from (1) “I got this” - looking determined and optimistic; (2) “Huh. Really thought that was it.” - looking a bit baffled; (3) “...” - looking up at the ceiling in thought; (4) “Fine. Restarting.” - looking a bit annoyed; (5) “OH WTF.” Looking very frazzled and frustrated; (6) “Zombie meltdown.” - looking like a full meltdown; (7) (blank) - sleeping; (8) “A NEW HOPE!” - a happy looking monster with a lightbulb above; (9) “insert awesome theme song” - looking determined and typing away; (10) “I love coding” - arms raised in victory with a big smile, with confetti falling.

A cartoon of a fuzzy round monster face showing 10 different emotions experienced during the process of debugging code. The progression goes from (1) “I got this” - looking determined and optimistic; (2) “Huh. Really thought that was it.” - looking a bit baffled; (3) “...” - looking up at the ceiling in thought; (4) “Fine. Restarting.” - looking a bit annoyed; (5) “OH WTF.” Looking very frazzled and frustrated; (6) “Zombie meltdown.” - looking like a full meltdown; (7) (blank) - sleeping; (8) “A NEW HOPE!” - a happy looking monster with a lightbulb above; (9) “insert awesome theme song” - looking determined and typing away; (10) “I love coding” - arms raised in victory with a big smile, with confetti falling.

A frustrated little monster sits on the ground with his hat next to him, saying "I just need a minute." Looking on empathetically is the R logo, with the word "Error" in many different styles behind it.

An enraged monster buddy with red eyes engulfed in a troubleshooting firestorm looking at a screenshot reading "An error has occurred...there is no packaged called 'tidyverse."

A friendly monster has slipped on a banana peel, and says "I know it was you, code. It breaks my heart." Meanwhile, a little character labeled "CODE" looks on indignantly, pointing to evil characters labeled "mismanaged files," "navigating your computer", and "typing" hiding behind a bush holding a bunch of bananas. The point being: often folks blame code for data science problems that are often caused by other underlying issues.

A bunny and a mouse, both looking stressed and sweaty, look on at a smoking laptop as flames start to grown from it. Text reads: "Plan on it."

Comic panels of an alligator trying to debug some code. First panel: A confident looking alligator gets an error message. Second panel: a few minutes later, the error remains and the alligator is looking carefully at their code. Third panel: 10 minutes after that, the error remains and the alligator is giving a frustrated "RAAAR" while desperately typing. Fourth panel: The error remains, and the alligator looks exhausted and exasperated, and a thought bubble reads "maybe it's a bug." Fifth panel: A friendly flamingo comes over to take a look, and reads aloud from the problematic code a spelling error: "L-E-N-G-H-T." Only the tail of the alligator is visible as it stomp stomp stomps out of the panel roaring.

Lessons learned - work in a branch, don't make mama bear angry. A three panel cartoon. Top: a happy looking developer thinks "maybe I'll push straight to main" while carrying a package toward a bear labeled "MAIN" - but the bear is angry with red eyes and bared teeth. Middle: The same developer walking away, with the beer looking peeved as she leaves. Bottom: The developer pushes a baby bear (labeled BRANCH, who is now holding the package) toward the mama bear, as the mama bear MAIN looks lovingly at it with outstretched arms.

Cartoon of an instructor gesturing enthusiastically to a screen full of R documentation saying "BEHOLD! An amazing function!" A skeptical looking student looks on, saying "I would rather not behold..."

Random stats / programming stuff

Visual representations of nominal, ordinal, and binary variables. Left: Nominal (ordered descriptions) with illustrations below of a turtle, snail, and butterfly. Center: Ordinal (ordered descriptions) with illustrations below of three bees - one looks unhappy (saying "I am unhappy"), one looks ok (saying "I am OK"), and one looks very happy (saying "I am awesome!"). Right: Binary (only 2 mutually exclusive outcomes), with below a T-rex saying "I am extinct" and a shark saying "HA."

Cartoon comparison of continuous versus discrete data. On the left: "Continuous - measured data, can have infinite values within possible range." Below is an illustration of a chick, with text "I am 3.1" tall, I weight 34.16 grams." On the right: "Discrete - observations can only exist at limited values, often counts." Below is an illustration of an octopus with text "I have 8 legs and 4 spots!"

Main text: "Are your summary statistics hiding something?" On the left is a opaque gray bar plot with an error bar, looking mischievous while hiding individual data points in a net behind it. On the right is a transparent bar plot with an error bar, looking exposed, with individual data points exposed and dancing. The bottom four data points have arms that spell "YMCA" as if dancing to the Village People.

Cartoon representations of common cases in coding. A snake screams "SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE" into the face of a camel (wearing ear muffs) with "camelCase" written along its back. Vegetables on a skewer spell out "kebab-case" (words on a skewer). A mellow, happy looking snake has text "snake_case" along it.

Joke, totally made up failed programming cases. ducklingcasE (all lowercase, represented as small ducklings, until the last letter as the mama duck). BatCase (written upside down, on a bat cartoon). SH__K_CASE (shark case - screaming snake but with big chunks taken out -- a shark is below chomping on the missing AR. Lobster case: snake_case but backwards, written on a lobster carapace moving in reverse.

A fun way to introduce some essential concepts in Principal Component Analysis: if you're a whale shark approaching a krill swarm, to get as many krill as possible in the fewest number of passes, you're going to want to rotate your face.

Illustration of a whale shark, with the face directly facing the viewer. There are subtle x and y axes overlaid onto the illustration. The whale shark’s oblong mouth is oriented horizontally along the x-axis. The whale shark looks friendly and has a slight smile on its face.

A swarm of illustrated krill in an oblong shape extending from the lower left corner upward toward the top right corner. The longest axis of the krill swarm at about a 45 degree angle. A subtle x and y axis are overlaid onto the krill swarm.

Illustrated for loop example. Input vector is a parade of monsters, including monsters that are circles, triangles, and squares. The for loop they enter has an if-else statement: if the monster is a triangle, it gets sunglasses. Otherwise, it gets a hat. The output is the parade of monsters where the same input parade of monsters shows up, now wearing either sunglasses (if triangular) or a hat (if any other shape).

Cartoon of a normal distribution looking skeptically at an excited looking bimodal / negatively skewed distribution. The first says to the second, "you're not normal."

An adult pie chart holding a briefcase, coming home from a successful job interview. She says "I got the gig. They said I was the right one for the job." Her family (another adult pie chart and two pie chart children) come sprinting toward her, arms outstretched and looking elated.

Festive / Just for fun

Two small monsters, one dressed as David Bowie (with facepaint lightning and a red wig, holding a jack-o-lantern shaped trick-or-treat tote) and the other wearing a witch hat, run in a panic toward the viewer out of a haunted forest. Creepy surrounding trees with glowing eyes in them have text on branches including ("well, technically...", "FATAL ERROR," "R Session Aborted," "Merge Conflict," "Data are available in PDF," "No metadata," "Untidy data" and more.

Two smiling green monsters in matching blue dresses (like the scary twins in The Shining), standing in a hallway with hex wallpaper. Behind them is spraypaint-style text reading "come play with us" with "forevR" in a hex logo behind them.

Two smiling green monsters in matching blue dresses (like the scary twins in The Shining), standing in a hallway with hex wallpaper. Behind them is spraypaint-style text reading "come play with us" with "forevR" in a hex logo behind them. There is part of a penguin's face in the foreground (as if they are inspecting the camera).

Two smiling green monsters in matching blue dresses (like the scary twins in The Shining) and wearing hockey helmets and gear, standing in a hallway with hex wallpaper. Behind them is spraypaint-style text reading "come play with us" with "forevR" in a hex logo behind them.

Small fuzzy R monsters in costume as famous villains from horror movies. Left to right: Chucky (wearing a wig, rainbow shirt and overalls, with stitches on its face), the girl from The Ring (black long hair over face), Hannibal Lecter (masked with bars in front of mouth), and Jason (iconic hockey mask). On the wall behind them are different menacing tools (butcher knives, saws, scythe) with scary things on them, e.g. "Can't automatically merge," "screenshot error message," "no such file or directory", "$ operator is invalid for atomic vectors."

A cute round monster, smiling while skating on a frozen pond in a winter snowscape with frosty pine trees. The skate tracks reveal what developers hope for in package checks: "0 warnings, 0 errors, 0 notes."

Coloring book illustration with words "Object of type closure is not subsettable," surrounded by flowers and an outer border.

Coloring book illustration with text "R session aborted" on top of a bomb shape with lit fuse, with decorative designs and shapes within it.

A cartoon of a cracked glass cube looking frustrated with casts on its arm and leg, with bandaids on it, containing “setwd”, looks on at a metal riveted cube labeled “R Proj” holding a skateboard looking sympathetic, and a smaller cube with a helmet on labeled “here” doing a trick on a skateboard.

A collaboration with David Keyes: a yound R aardvark, wearing a cape with the words "future R superstar" on it. Printed onto a onesie for a friends' baby.

Illustrations about teaching data science

A totally run-down looking fuzzy monster walks on a train track carrying a folder labeled "final exams," with a freight train labeled "prep for next quarter" barreling toward them.

A frustrated looking little monster in front of a very disorganized cooking area, with smoke and fire coming from a pot surrounded by a mess of bowls, utensils, and scattered ingredients.

An organized kitchen with sections labeled "tools", "report" and "files", while a monster in a chef's hat stirs in a bowl labeled "code."

An exasperated teacher holding a box that says "Another important thing" walks towards a box labeled "course content", where different unruly topics labeled "essential", "core" etc. are leaping out and running away.

A small, proud looking monster standing on shoulders of two giant friendly looking monsters, with text that read "Data science educators" and "Statistics educators." Background is skyscrapers and seagulls flying.

A cartoon monster student in a backpack looks on at stunning gems labeled "Touchstones of Intuition", which have the text "You know some stuff" written on sequential crystals.

A cartoon fuzzy monster crossing guard holding a stop sign reading "STOP! Learning opportunities crossing," in front of a little parade of cute monsters representing errors.

A little monster in a cool black jacket and sunglasses, leaning casually against a fence with a sign reading "Warning! Live troubleshooting!"

A little monster flying a biplane wearing aviator glasses, pulling a banner that says "Fully expecting to hate this class." Below, a teacher wearing a cheerleading outfit labeled "STATS" with a bullhorn labeled "CODE" cheering desperately with pom-poms, trying to help students believe stats is actually going to be awesomely life-changing.

A humpback whale cartoon, teaching a class of dolphins, seal and another whale some calculus (probably) by pointing out the local maximum of a "MAX SPLASH!" function on a whiteboard.

A cartoon dog teaches a group of other dogs how to beg for treats. On a sign they are pointing at is a picture of a dog, showing step 1: drop one ear, then (%>%) rotate your head for max cuteness.

Back to Top