Our Characters

These people represent common attitudes to data and statistics that we have met.  We hope they will feel familiar and that you will identify with or recognize the attitudes they represent. We use them to discuss different views on the training materials as they are developed.

Thomas - R-Shy  

Thomas is R-Shy. He would not dream of going to a programming course. He knows he will suffer in the quantitative parts of his work and is dreading the data science and statistics courses. He can cope with Excel but doesn’t even like that.


Talia - R-OK

Talia is R-OK. She quite likes numbers but is more interested in biology and languages. She was able to cope with the introductory R course; but throughout the statistics course, kept needing to be reminded of the appropriate R commands. It was a distraction from the data science and statistics. At the end her R had improved, but the courses were not much fun, and she had not learned as much statistics as she would have liked.



Christina - R-Fan

Christina is our R-Fan. She is keen on computer science. She attended the introductory R course and found it easy. She liked Python too. Then she used R in the statistics courses –through RStudio – and found it all fine.



Spencer - A Spreadsheet Fan

He enters in the prepare menu presentation. He is a spreadsheet fan.  He wishes that he could just stick with that, but is realising it is limiting him. He is reluctantly feeling he may need to add a statistics package to his toolbox. 


Stella - A Statistics and Data Science Teacher

 She first enters in the Tutorial 1 take-aways. Stella has an open mind and is actively looking for ways to improve her statistics and data science teaching. She would like to use more interesting and realistic data in her classes, to prepare her students better for the real world.  This is something requested both by her students and by organisations, where they go for work experience.


Daisy - A Data Scientist

She is a compiter science graduate and is specially interested in machine learning and big data.  She has done very little statistics and wonders whether that matters?  She enters, in the first data presentation. 

Tracy and Elena - A Mother and Daughter

Elena is a girl from Kenya whose attitude to maths was transformed by going to maths camp. There she played and learned about all sorts of maths, much of which she had never considered to be mathematical. Her mother Tracy works for an NGO and these days they are flooded with data. She used to be someone who comforted her daughter earlier, saying “Don’t worry if you don’t like maths at school – I didn’t either.” Now that her daughter has changed, and she wonders if she could to. It would be great if she could get involved with the data issues in her work.


The images used for these characters, throughout our documentation, are from Microsoft 365.  They are used with the permission of Microsoft.