Editing Intro to Programming and Data Science (Fall 2024) (section)

=== Project presentation and report ===

;Report due date: December 11
;Maximum length: 4000 words (~15 pages)

;Presentation due date: December 3 and December 5
;Maximum length: 8 minutes

==== The project report ====

You will write a document or a Jupyter Notebook that will ideally provide the foundation for a high quality short research paper that you might revise and submit for publication. I do not expect the report to be ready for publication, but it should contain polished drafts of all the necessary components of a scholarly quantitative empirical research study. In terms of the structure, please see the page on the [[structure of a quantitative empirical research paper]].

The great thing about a Jupyter Notebook is that it allows you to provide data, code, and any documentation sufficient to enable the replication of all analysis and visualizations. If you choose to write the report as a Word document, then you will need to include the code in a separate file.

Because the emphasis in this class is on methods and because I'm not an expert in each of your fields, I'm happy to assume that your paper, proposal, or thesis chapter has already established the relevance and significance of your study and has a comprehensive literature review, well-grounded conceptual approach, and compelling reason why this research is important. As a result, you do not need to focus on these elements of the work in your written submission. Instead, feel free to start with a brief summary of the purpose and importance of this research followed by an introduction of your research questions or hypotheses. If you provide more detail, that's fine, but I won't give you detailed feedback on these parts and they will not figure prominently in my assessment of the work.

Jupyter Notebooks do not have all of the tools for citations that Word or LaTeX or even Google Docs have, so while I expect you to cite related work your references section does not need to be as polished as citation management software would make it.

==== The presentation ====

The presentation will provide an opportunity to share a brief summary of your project and findings with the other members of the class. However, don't treat it as a comprehensive overview of your paper: I would rather you tell a subset of the story well than the whole story in a rushed fashion. For instance, you can give a completely successful presentation by describing the motivation and walking through one plot in your paper. Since many of you will give many research presentations throughout your career, I strongly encourage you to take the opportunity to refine your academic presentation skills.

I anticipate that most people will either create a PowerPoint presentation or will walk us through a simple Jupyter Notebook. All presentations will need to be ''a maximum of 8 minutes long''. Concisely communicating an idea in the time allotted is an important skill in its own right. Presentations should be uploaded to the Discussion forum on Brightspace created for this purpose.