Introducing swirl 2.4.0

The first major swirl release in over a year comes with some big changes. First we would like to thank all of the translators that answered the call when we started looking for volunteers to translate swirl’s menus. Because of their efforts swirl’s menus are now available in Spanish, French, German, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, and Korean in addition to English. You can select the language you prefer with the new select_language() function. There have also been several amazing courses created for swirl in non-English languages including ConoceR by David Duncan, Programando en R by José Sosa, Programación Estadística con R by Ismael Martínez, and Data Science and R (R語言翻轉教室) by Wush Wu.

Courses created with the latest version of swirlify can be distributed as .swc files, and these files can be installed with the new install_course() function. This function also aims to replace install_from_swirl(). Providing just the name of the course you want to install - for example install_course("R Programming") - will install the course up to ten times faster than install_from_swirl("R Programming"). We do not have to plans to remove any of swirl’s old course installation functions, however moving forward install_course() will receive the most attention from developers.

We’ve also added an interface for options() called swirl_options() which allows you to change where courses are installed on your computer, where swirl user data is stored on your computer, and whether or not swirl should log your progress during lessons. We’ll be releasing details on how you can use logging in swirl courses in order to evaluate how your students are using swirl.

From this release on we expect to have regular updates every one or two months, with new features and menu translations. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please send us an email, a tweet, or a pull request!

- Team swirl