Editing Community Data Science Workshops (Winter 2020)/Reflections (section)

== Participants ==

We had '''n''' mentors who attended at least one of the sessions and at least '''n''' mentors at each sessions. Many of our mentors were UW students in more technical departments like [https://www.cs.washington.edu/ Computer Science and Engineering] and [https://www.hcde.washington.edu Human Centered Design & Engineering]. Perhaps half of them worked outside of the university as software developers.

We had about '''n''' participants apply to attend the sessions. We selected on programming skill (to ensure that all attendees were complete beginners), enthusiasm, and randomly to maintain a learner to mentor ratio of between 4 and 5. We admitted '''n''' participants. '''n''' listed a UW affiliations. Affiliations listed by at least three people include the following:

{| class=wikitable
! Department !! Participants
|-
| HCDE || '''n'''
|-
| iSchool || '''n'''
|-
| Communication || '''n'''
|- 
| Anthropology || '''n'''
|- 
| Alumni ||'''n'''
|- 
| Undergrad || '''n'''
|- 
|}

'''other affiliations?'''

Retention between session and 0 and 1 was nearly 100%. Retention between sessions 1 and 2 and sessions 2 and 3 was roughly '''n'''% leaving us with perhaps '''n'''% retention between session 0 and session 3.

Once again, quite a large number of people applied were already skilled programmers. We're still not exactly sure why these people are applying because we think that the fact that the workshops are for absolute beginners is very clear. Perhaps people just want more exposure to data science?

Once again, the constraint on scaling the workshop was the number of mentors. Every mentor we added means that the workshop can accommodate four more participants.

One suggestion was allowing participants with have some programming skills — especially for the second and third workshops (given predictable rates of retention). There was not consensus among the organizers and mentors on this approach and preferred getting more newbies and invest more in them?