Practical Exercises
This page hosts the practical exercise submissions for R-LAB attendees. Each week, you will complete a hands-on coding activity and submit your work by contributing directly to the R-LAB GitHub repository. This process mirrors real-world collaborative software development and is itself a practical skill worth learning.
Getting Started
You will only need to complete steps 1–3 once.
Fork the repository. Navigate to the 2026-RLAB-Practical-Exercises GitHub repository and click Fork in the top-right corner. This creates your own personal copy of the repository under your GitHub account.
Clone your fork. Copy your forked repository to your local machine:
git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/2026-RLAB-Practical-Exercises.gitView GitHub documentation for more information on cloning.
Add to your folder. All weekly submissions should be saved in the code/ directory within the folder named for you. A template file is provided to help you get started on each exercise. Feel free to modify the template and add any additional code, notes, or documentation you find helpful.
Submitting Your Work
Repeat these steps each week after completing the practical exercise.
Add your file. Save your completed exercise as a .qmd file within the folder named for you. Make sure the file has a title, subtitle, author, and date in the YAML header:
---
title: "Week 1: Basics in R"
subtitle: "Practice Reading and Manipulating Data"
date: 2026-06-24
---You can also add an optional image to be displayed on your list of submissions. Each exercise should have echo set to true to display the code and eval set to true to evaluate the code blocks.
Commit and push. From your local repository, stage, commit, and push your changes using git commands (see below), your integrated development environment (e.g., R Studio, Positron, VS Code), or GitHub Desktop.
git add
git commit -m "Add week 1 exercise"
git push origin mainOpen a pull request. Go to your forked repository on GitHub and click Contribute > Open pull request. Add a brief title (e.g., “Week 1 submission - Firstname Lastname”) and click Create Pull Request. Your work will be reviewed and merged into the main repository.
Tips
- Keep one .qmd file per week so your submissions stay organized. Your portfolio will be arranged according to the date in the YAML.
- If the main repository has been updated since you forked it, sync your fork on GitHub (Sync fork > Update branch) before pushing new work to avoid merge conflicts. This should not happen if content is only being changed in participant folders.