By Christina Jamroz
Information
Creating lessons for introductory data science using Jupyter notebooks allows instructors to introduce data science concepts along with use of software in an interactive student-centered environment. In this session, I will discuss my experience creating lessons using this format for an introductory data science course using Python, and I will demonstrate one lesson on data visualization. The lesson notebooks typically consist of a warm-up problem, reading review questions, explanation of new content, examples, and practice problems. Students were provided with the notebooks and necessary data sets before class, so that they were prepared to interact with the content throughout the lesson. Informally, feedback on course evaluations indicated that students felt that this format of instruction aided in their learning. This course was taught in a computer classroom at a small liberal arts university, and had statistics and an introductory programming course as prerequisites. The enrollment of the course was approximately ten mathematics majors.