Materials on this site were developed with: R version 4.6.1 (2026-06-24) – “Happy Hop”. We generally encourage students to install the most recent version of R that is compatible with their laptop, with the hope that most laptops can support R version >= 4.1.0.

Should that not be feasible, this page lists some alternative ways forward.


The primary alternative

The desktop computers in Biological Sciences 2004 are available to any BIOL 300 student during their enrolled section time. Using these computers should be the primary alternative for any student who does not own a laptop or has an older laptop.


WebR

A potential but very limited option is to use WebR. WebR runs R inside your web browser, so it does not require a local R/RStudio installation or a separate R server.

However, WebR is not a full replacement for RStudio. Not all R packages are available or supported. WebR may be slower on older computers, and file handling is different from working in RStudio. For this reason, the BIOL 300 teaching team does not fully endorse WebR. It is best treated as a fallback option for running basic R code when the desktop computers in Biosci 2004 aren’t available (e.g., outside of section time).

See further details on the WebR website: https://docs.r-wasm.org/webr/latest/


Older package versions

It may be possible to do these labs with R < 4.1.0. The script below can be used to install packages (+ dependencies) without relying on the current versions of packages on CRAN. This is useful for cases where the current version of a package on CRAN is not compatible with the specific version of R and/or versions of other packages on a student’s older laptop. It requires the pak package.

## NOTE: Close the ABDlabs project prior to running these lines

## 1) Install pak (once)
install.packages("pak")

## 2) Pick a snapshot date 
## (example: late 2018 / early 2019 tends to be R 3.5-friendly)
snapshot_date <- "2019-02-01"

## 3) Point CRAN at the snapshot (PPM)
## This sets options(repos=...) for the current session
pak::repo_add(CRAN = paste0("PPM@", snapshot_date))

## 4) Install target packages + ALL dependencies from that snapshot
pak::pkg_install(c("tidyverse", "car"))

Last substantive update: 2026-08-21