I mentored a fantastic undergraduate in an #rstats software development project. He ended up making a Shiny app that takes a Twitter handle as input and generates tweets that mimic the speech patterns of that handle. It's ridiculously fun to play with. https://serrat839.shinyapps.io/mRkov_shiny/ 

His name is Thomas Serrano and he's presenting his work at the (online) UW Undergraduate Research Symposium this Friday from 3:30 - 4:15 PST!

The project was run through the UW Department of Statistics brand new undergraduate directed reading program! https://spa-drp.github.io/ 

The directed reading program is entirely managed and run by graduate students, and is a great way for PhD students to get involved and connected with undergraduates. If you are a PhD student and think your department could benefit from a similar program, get in touch!

More detail because I feel it's worth adding: the goals of the program include building community, developing valuable research skills for mentees (and mentors!), and providing an opportunity for students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds to explore statistics!

FYI to people trying this: this tweet got popular enough that we went WAY over the limits of the server we are using to host it. We are trying to find solutions, but in the meantime, you may see a "bad handle" error.

If you *really* want to try, and have some R know-how...

...you can download the Shiny app yourself from @thomas_is_srs Github repo available here: https://github.com/serrat839/mRkov_shiny

Step 1: remotes::install_github("serrat839/mRkov")
Step 2: shiny::runGithub("mRkov_shiny", username = "serrat839")

No server issues guaranteed!