By Katherine Shoemaker (University of Houston - Downtown)
Information
University of Houston – Downtown is a masters granting institution that is both an HSI and MSI; a large percentage of students are first generation, non-traditional, or both. This poster is focused on the final project of the introductory Data Science course, the first in a set of the three core DS courses in the Bachelors of Data Science program. The class size ranges from 15 to 35, the students vary in background and major, and the only prerequisite is precalculus. Thus, this course takes students from no background in data communication to a final project where they use R, the tidyverse, and RMarkdown to load, clean, process, explore, visualize, and explain data (of their choosing) in a real-world project. The data exploration is student led, allowing the instructor to move away from the "sage on the stage" model to be a consultant and guide. Furthermore, the project is done in a Github repository, so this can present an opportunity to start their data science portfolio, which can be linked on their resumes. An IRB has been submitted for qualitative feedback of the current semester’s class’s experience as well as a retrospective study of previous students.