Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Reflections: Difference between revisions

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 == Session 1: Introduction to Python ==
-The goal of this session was to teach the basic of programming in Python.  The basic curriculum was originally built off the [[Boston Python Workshop]] curriculum has been used many times and is well tested.  Unsurprisingly, it worked well for us as well. We made several major changes. The biggest is that we retained only the [[Wordplay]] project and we installed createa new project [[Baby Names]] that uses Social Security Administration data on the frequency of Baby Names.
+The goal of this session was to teach the basic of programming in Python.  The basic curriculum was originally built off the [[Boston Python Workshop]] curriculum which has been used many times and is well tested.  Unsurprisingly, it worked well for us as well.
+That said, we made several major changes this time around. The biggest is that we retained only the [[Wordplay]] project. We also created a new project,  [[Baby Names]], that uses Social Security Administration data on the frequency of Baby Names.
 === Afternoon sessions ===
-We felt that that the new [[Baby Names]] was excellent and feedback was overwhelming positive. Because it includes both lists of names and numbers, it can do everything that [[Wordplay]] can but it has a much stronger feel of science to it and a higher ceiling.  Wordplay felt relatively boring.
+We felt that that the new [[Baby Names]] project was excellent and feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Because it includes both dictionaries and lists of names (in the form of <code>.keys()</code> methods), it can do everything that [[Wordplay]] can but it has a much stronger feel of data science to it and, generally, a higher ceiling.  Wordplay felt relatively boring.
 Suggestions based on feedback include:
 * Do a better job of brining folks back to gether to walk through potential solutions to the questions posed in the project rooms.
-* Consider simply having two smaller rooms doing [[Baby Names]] and perhaps have one that emphasizes more numeric and math operations.
+* Consider simply having two smaller rooms doing [[Baby Names]] and perhaps having one that emphasizes more numeric and math operations.
 * Prepare questions before hand, list them all up front, and let folks choose what to work on.