ETC5513: Collaborative and Reproducible Practices

Workshop 1

Author

Michael Lydeamore

Published

11 March 2026

🎯 Objectives

  • Getting to know your colleagues
  • Getting setup with R, RStudio and GitHub

Install R on your computer

R is maintained by an international team of developers and is available via The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) webpage. Please select the appropriate download option depending on your operating system: Windows, Mac, or Linux.

You can find some further information about how to install R here.

Install Positron on your computer

Positron is an integrated development environment for R, a programming language for statistical computing and graphics. It is a reasonably new product, but is designed to integrate with a fairly standard development system, so the workflow can be applied to other languages.

TipPositron

Get yourself a free GitHub Student Developer pack

Sign up for a free GitHub Student Developer Pack. You will have to use your Monash email account (which you can add to your existing GitHub account if you like) and make sure you remember your login details!

To sign up, click here.

Getting to know more about R

Have a read about R here.

Get a ChatGPT account

Sign up for a free ChatGPT account here. You can use your Monash email address if you like.

Ask ChatGPT to give you an example of R code, then copy the code into RStudio and execute it. Compare with your colleagues at your table. Is it the same? Is it different? Is it correct?

Installing tools

If you haven’t already done so, get yourself set up with the remaining necessary tools for this unit:

R in practice

There are plenty of resources to start getting to know how R works. Here are a couple:

  1. StartR
  2. Posit (R) Primers

For the remainder of today’s workshop, start working through Module 3 of the StartR course. This will give you a good introduction to R, and will prepare you for the next few weeks of workshops and assignments.