RTutor: The effect of the TseTse fly on African Development

03 Jun 2017

What is the causal impact of the TseTse fly on historical and current development in Africa? Marcella Alsan studies this question in her fascinating article ‘The effect of the TseTse fly on African development’ in the American Economic Review, 2015.

As part of her Bachelor Thesis at Ulm University, Vanessa Schöller has generated a very nice RTutor problem set that allows you to replicate the main insights of the paper in an interactive fashion.

Here is screenshoot:


Like in previous RTutor problem sets, you can enter free R code in a web based shiny app. The code will be automatically checked and you can get hints how to procceed. In addition you are challenged by many multiple choice quizzes.

To install the problem set the problem set locally, first install RTutor as explained here:

https://github.com/skranz/RTutor

and then install the problem set package:

https://github.com/vanessaschoeller/RTutorTseTse

There is also an online version hosted by shinyapps.io that allows you explore the problem set without any local installation. (The online version is capped at 30 hours total usage time per month. So it may be greyed out when you click at it.)

https://vanessaschoeller.shinyapps.io/RTutorTseTse/

If you want to learn more about RTutor, to try out other problem sets, or to create a problem set yourself, take a look at the RTutor Github page

https://github.com/skranz/RTutor

Published on 03 Jun 2017