9. Argument project

A week focused on the Argument project, the culminating project of the data science unit. Choose a question you care about and a dataset that can help answer it, complete proposal.md, and use Jupyter and Pandas (from the Pokémon lab) to answer one research question in argument.ipynb.

Weekly update

Outline

• 0:00 The two culminating assignments for Unit 2
• 0:11 Number Words problem set
  • Each unit has a problem set: like a lab, but done on your own. It's a chance to prove to yourself that you can do this, balancing the work you do with your group. It's not a high-stakes test. If you get stuck, reach out.
  • Problem sets are a very common kind of assignment in college CS courses and in advanced high school courses like AP Computer Science A.
  • Turning digits into written-out numbers looks hard, but it's perfect for the top-down, bottom-up thinking from the Scatter lab. Once you can write numbers under 10, numbers under 100 get much easier; once you can do 76, 276 is just "two hundred" plus 76.
• 3:15 Argument project
  • In high school we spend a lot of time on open-ended projects. That's unfamiliar in a standards-driven curriculum, and it can be more intellectually intense than a structured one. Students need a lot of support, especially with the frustration that only comes up in authentic, open-ended problems.
  • The project is a chance to bring culturally sustaining pedagogy into CS: choosing data that engages the issues students grapple with outside school, and parts of their identities that don't usually get invited into CS classes. See A Teacher's Guide To Introducing a Critically-Engaging Data Science Project.
  • In this course the project is more tightly scoped. Choose a dataset you find interesting (elections are coming up!) and use the strategies from the Pokémon lab. The focus is descriptive statistics, presenting patterns in the data, not inferential statistics or causal claims.
  • Treat it as a chance to explore, and to think about how you might use this kind of project with your own students. Please don't let it be stressful.