Editing Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Reflections (section)

=== Afternoon sessions ===

We ran two sessions this time.

An '''analysis with spreadsheets session''' similar to what we taught last time. This was improved and more effective. By the end, many participants were modifying the code to build their own datasets and doing their own visualizations. One student built a time series of edits to articles about death by police and another to articles about the NFL. In both cases, real patterns driven by current events became clearly visible.

We also ran a session on '''matplotlib''' which was taught by two mentors we brought in specifically to teach it but who had limited experience with the CDSW. Some people in the session were lost. Because the mentors who taught it were not at the other sessions, they therefore didn’t go in with a good sense of where the participants were at. In the future, we should loop in teachers better to where the participants are at. For example, we might encourage new mentors do a practice session with some friendly folks before they let loose.

Also, next session, we are going to consider using [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/seaborn/0.1 SeaBorn] instead of matplotlib which Tommy seemed excited about.