cataScience — Interactive Training App for Data Science and AI Skills

cataScience is an interactive Shiny training companion built for WHO trainings and aimed at people new to working with data. Rather than a set of slides, it is a hands-on application: learners load real data, make the usual mistakes in a safe environment, and work through each step at their own pace.

The package is published on CRAN under the MIT licence and can be run locally or on a Shiny server.

Training modules

The app is organised into seven areas:

• Import — loading Excel and CSV files, or starting from the bundled example datasets
• Cleaning — missing values, outliers, text formatting, and merging files
• Visualize — seven chart types, with grouping and facetting options
• Statistics — describing data, distributions, t-tests and regression
• AI — prompting techniques, a gallery of examples, AI-assisted analysis, and safety considerations
• Quiz — 27 questions, filterable by topic for each session
• Training — instructor resources, including playbooks, lab scripts and evaluation checklists

The instructor materials mean the app can be used either for self-paced learning or as the backbone of a facilitated workshop.

Installation

install.packages("cataScience")

Then launch the app from an R session:

library(cataScience)
run_cata()

Requires R 4.1.0 or later.