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

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 === Morning lecture ===
-The morning lecture was given by Frances Hocutt and it was was well received — if delivered too slowly for a significant minority of attendees. Unsurprisingly, the example of [http://placekitten.com/ PlaceKitten] as an API was an enormous hit: informative ''and'' cute.
+The [[Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Day 2 lecture|morning lecture] was given by Frances Hocutt and it was well received. Unsurprisingly, the example of [http://placekitten.com/ PlaceKitten] as an API was an enormous hit: informative ''and'' cute.
-Frances used excellent slides which are shared on the wiki page and which we will reuse. About half found Frances’s lecture either too fast or too slow and about half found the lecture to be just right.
+Frances used excellent slides which are shared [[Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Day 2 lecture|on the wiki page]] and which we will reuse. About half found Frances’s lecture either too fast or too slow and about half found the lecture to be just right.
-Since many people felt the lecture was on the slower side, we want to use this time to introduce function definition up front. Then, functions can be reinforced in the week 2 workshops.
+Since many people felt the lecture was on the slower side, we want to use this time to introduce function definitions. We will also devote a bit less time to review which, because of the one week spacing between sessions, feels less important than it did last time.
 === Afternoon sessions ===
-There were three parallel afternoon sessions on '''Twitter''', '''Wikipedia API''' and '''SQL'''. We plan to do some version of all three sessions next round:
+There were three parallel afternoon sessions on '''Twitter''', '''Wikipedia API''' and '''SQL'''. All three werew successful and we plan to do some version of all three sessions next round:
 '''Twitter''':
-* Once again, the session too many people and we should consider splitting it if we have mentors who are comfortable splitting it.
+* Once again, the session had too many people for the room and we should consider splitting it if we have mentors who are comfortable teaching it and we should try to arrange this ahead of time.
-* Next time, we should be careful to make sure that the advance notice asks everybody to download the project zip file ahead of time. If we're going to do this in class, we should set up a short URL of some sort to help streamline the process without heading to the wiki things.
+* We should be careful to make sure that the advance notice asks everybody to download the project zip file ahead of time. If we're going to do this in class instead, we should set up a short URL to help streamline the process without forcing everybody to head to the wiki for things.
-* A bunch of people found the Twitter session too fast.
+* A bunch of people found the Twitter session too fast so we should try to slow this down.
+* TweePy continues to be both poorly documented and opaque. Tthe opaqueness of tweepy was a problem and we may want to create an interface to Tweepy that just gives users raw JSON.
-* TweePy is not well documented.
-the opaqueness of tweepy was a problem.. option to creat ea version of tweppty that just gives you json
-or miku or michael for details onhow to do that
-dharma might be able to do this.
 '''Wikipedia''' workshop:
+* In terms of delivery, there was mixed feedback including some excellent feedback and some who felt that it was too detailed and slow. This mirrored some of our feedback from last time. One approach would be to make the Wikipedia room be a designated "slower" room.
-* The teacher explained things very clearly. That was frustrating for those who didn’t need it, but super great for people that wanted/needed a lot of explanation.
-* Graduated challenges in a workhshop that go from less challenging to more and more challenging helps with the fact there is a range of learning levels.
+* We should consider graduated challenges that go from less challenging to more and more challenging which might help with the fact there is a range of learning levels.
 '''SQL workshop''':
+Jonathan ran a session on using SQL. Although this was a diversion from the strong Python focus, it was well attended and apprecaited by students tryint to build up this skill.
-* Generally was very successfuly Seemed to work really well and did a good job of giving people an overview of a data science and a way to hook themselves in to it.
-* Next session, also do a workshop that closes the loop between SQL and Python.
-* Can we host an open SQL database somewhere?
-- maybe split this into two session next time
-- merge in some more python this time
-#1 intro into sql
-#2 using pythong o tgra data and bring python and pandas
+* Generally thje session was was very successful and seemed to do a good job of giving people an overview of a data science and a way to hook themselves in to it.
+* Next session, if we do this again, we should consider integrating Python more closely into this. We may either close the loop in this session or perhaps split into two sessions: (1) introduction to SQL; and (2) using Python to bring data back into Python (e.g., in Pandas).
+* We should consider hosting an open SQL database somewhere.
 == Session 3: Data Analysis and Visualization ==