By Davit Khachatryan (Babson College)
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Learners from a wide spectrum of backgrounds, both personal and professional, are finding interest in data science and statistics. A natural question for us educators is—how to deliver data science/statistics education that is inclusive of such diverse backgrounds. One medium that can work well to cultivate engagement and inclusion is music. The author has built a novel web application (“app”) for the purpose of inclusive and engaging data science/statistics education using music. The Playmeans app is free for students to use, is publicly available, and has been recently tested in classroom. Playmeans is an interactive app intended for audio-visual exploratory data analysis through histograms and K-means clustering. After obtaining the required credentials for logging into Playmeans, a student specifies their artist of interest and acquires the corresponding “discography” in real time from the popular audio streaming platform Spotify through the Spotify Application Programming Interface (API). Very importantly, the analysis of the data is meant to be not just visual but instead audio-visual. In other words, not only is a student able to visually explore the data but also, importantly, hear the music by clicking on the appropriate areas of the visualizations. The author has successfully implemented Playmeans in an introductory undergraduate course in analytics, garnering overwhelmingly positive reception from students. Playmeans can flexibly be integrated as part of an in-class activity or as a homework assignment. It can be incorporated into introductory as well as advanced courses at a college or a university, and even into an introductory high school course on statistics and data science.