Data Science Course in a Box

Note: This repo is currently a WIP. Materials are based this Spring 2018 course. See https://www.tidyverse.org/learn/ for other learning resources as well.

Course description

How can we effectively and efficiently teach statistical thinking and computation to students with little to no background in either? How can we equip them with the skills and tools for reasoning with various types of data and leave them wanting to learn more?

This introductory data science course that is our (working) answer to these questions. The courses focuses on data acquisition and wrangling, exploratory data analysis, data visualization, and effective communication and approaching statistics from a model-based, instead of an inference-based, perspective. A heavy emphasis is placed on a consitent syntax (with tools from the tidyverse), reproducibility (with R Markdown) and version control and collaboration (with git/GitHub). We help ease the learning curve by avoiding local installation and supplementing out-of-class learning with interactive tools (like learnr tutorials). By the end of the semester teams of students work on fully reproducible data analysis projects on data they acquired, answering questions they care about.

This repository serves as a "data science course in a box" containing all materials required to teach (or learn from) the course described above.

Contents

• slides: 25 xaringan slide decks, each to be covered roughly in a 75 minute class session
• assignments: 6 homewoek assignments
• labs: 10 guided hands on exercises for students requiring minimal introduction from the instructor
• exams: 2 sample take-home exams and keys
• project: Final project assignment
• (WIP) tutorials: Interactive learning exercises built with learnr
• (WIP) dsbox-book: This book contains information on the computing infrastructure of this course and is designed for teachers, while the remainder of the content is for teachers and learners. Specifically it covers:
  • RStudio: Why to use one of the below and how to structure the course if you’re using one of the below?
    • RStudio Server Pro
    • RStudio Cloud
  • git/GitHub: How to use git and GitHub as the learning management system for your course as well as a collaborative platform for your students.
    • Structure
    • Management:
      • GitHub Classroom
      • ghclass
  • Creating learnr modules
  • Using blogdown to create your course website

Resources

Talks

• SDSS 2018: Start with Data Science
• useR 2017: Teaching data science to new useRs
  • Slides
  • Video
• ...

Articles

• Practical Data Science for Stats collection
• Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Data Science
• ...

Teaching materials

• R4DS: http://r4ds.had.co.nz/
• RStudio Primers: https://rstudio.cloud/learn/primers
• ...

Tools

• ghclass (WIP)
• ...