Choose Your Own Data
Pick some data that interests you and work with it
Introduction
To a certain extent, the title of this assignment says it all.
For this assignment we would like you to find some data that interests you. Some possible ideas:
- a sport or hobby that interests you
- a subject you teach
- a class you have taught (NOTE, if you do this you should anonymize the data since you will share this data with us later in the assignment. You can always copy and paste names from our customer data assignment to mask out real names.)
But don't limit yourself. Think about some data you would like to play with and see if you can find it on the internet.
If you are having problems with ideas or finding data for your great idea, please reach out to me.
Step One
- Find the data on the internet.
- If you are lucky it is already in a .csv or .txt format.
- But if it isn't, see if you can cut and paste it in to a spreadsheet of yourself and select "Save As" and save it out as a .csv file.
- Save the file with the name
- <YourLastName><YourFirstInitial>.csv
- For example, I would save it as SchaferB.csv
- Copy this in to your folder in the following shared google folder
Step Two
- Figure out two interesting ways to analyze this data. Use the kinds of things we have done in our previous assignments to come up with some ideas.
- Write two or more functions that help you accomplish these two analyses.
- Save these in a python file named
- <YourLastName><YourFirstInitial>.py
- For example, I would save it as SchaferB.py
- Test them well and make sure that they work as expected.
- Copy this in to your folder in the following shared google folder
Step Three
- Write up a very short "readme" file that explains what your code does and how it gives us some interesting results.
- Save this in a file named
- <YourLastName><YourFirstInitial>_README.txt or .doc
- For example, I would save it as SchaferB_README.txt or SchaferB_README.doc
- Copy this in to your folder in the following shared google folder
In other words, by the time you are done, a classmate should be able:
- Go to your folder
- Download your three files
- Open/Load your .py file
- Read your readme file and figure out how to run the code
- Look at and understand the results.
Disclaimer
Some of you are going to hate this assignment because we are not telling you step by step what to do. Instead we are saying "Take what you learned in this course and figure out if you really understand the power of what you have learned to do."
The frustrating part will be focussing in on an idea or two and finding the data to do it.
The fun part will be you get to pick something that interests you AND you will be able to look through a whole bunch of ideas for things you might ask YOUR students to do in their classrooms.
PLEASE, reach out to me if the open endedness of this is too much for you. If so, I can work with you to help you focus in on something. Similarly, if you have a great idea but are struggling getting the data in to a format you can use, than talk to me. I can help you with that too.