Data Science Playground

Data science plays an increasingly important role in research, industry, and government. Researchers seek to understand behavior and mechanisms, companies seek to increase profits, and government agencies make policies intended to improve society. While we are awash in an abundance of data, making sense of data is not always straightforward. At its core, students of data science learn techniques for analyzing, visualizing, and understanding data. However, students must also cultivate curiosity about data, including the data's provenance, ethical considerations such as bias, and skepticism concerning correlation and causality. In the beginning, students investigate a curated collection of data sets, asking questions they find interesting and exploring data using a popular platform for such studies. Thereafter, researchers on campus present their work in the context of data science, challenging students to explore data in the domain of their research areas. Throughout the course, students present their findings in their group and to the class. This course is offered in an active-learning setting in which students work in small teams. The course has no prerequisites, and programming experience is neither expected nor required. All credit for this pass/fail course is based on work performed in the scheduled class time.