  In a world awash with data, the ability to think and compute with data has
become an important skill for students in many fields. For that reason,
inclusion of some level of statistical computing in many introductory-level
courses has grown more common in recent years. Existing literature has
documented multiple success stories of teaching statistics with R, bolstered by
the capabilities of R Markdown. In this article, we present an in-class data
visualization activity intended to expose students to R and R Markdown during
the first week of an introductory statistics class. The activity begins with a
brief lecture on exploratory data analysis in R. Students are then placed in
small groups tasked with exploring a new dataset to produce three
visualizations that describe particular insights that are not immediately
obvious from the data. Upon completion, students will have produced a series of
univariate and multivariate visualizations on a real dataset and practiced
describing them.
