Chris Malone (Winona State University), Todd Iverson (Winona State University)
Abstract
Learning to write code is hard and doing data science is hard. The presenters of this workshop will discuss and share curriculum that has been developed to reduce some of the the barriers to learning how to write code in an introductory data science course. This curriculum requires students to create a plan or design for their code where each individual data processing step is clearly defined. This design is then used to guide the writing of the code in a variety of computing technologies - starting with non-programming software (e.g. Excel and Tableau Prep) and then eventually moving into scripted programming languages (e.g. Python and R). The presenters believe that the obstacles students face in learning how to write code may be reduced when students separate the design of their code from the implementation of their code.