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

== Session 2: Learning APIs ==

The goal of this session was to describe what web APIs were, how they worked (making HTTP requests and receiving data back), how to understand JSON Data, and how to use common web APIs from Wikipedia and Twitter.

=== Morning lecture ===

The [[Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Day 2 lecture|morning lecture]] was given by Frances Hocutt and it was well received. Unsurprisingly, the example of [http://placekitten.com/ PlaceKitten] as an API was an enormous hit: informative ''and'' cute.

Frances used excellent slides which are shared [[Community Data Science Workshops (Fall 2014)/Day 2 lecture|on the wiki page]] and which we will reuse. About half found the lecture either too fast or too slow and about half found the lecture to be just right.

Since many people felt the lecture was on the slower side, we want to use this time to introduce function definitions. We will also devote a bit less time to review which, because of the one week spacing between sessions, feels less important than it did last time.

=== Afternoon sessions ===

There were three parallel afternoon sessions on '''Twitter''', '''Wikipedia API''' and '''SQL'''. All three were successful and we plan to do some version of all three sessions next round:

'''Twitter''':

* Once again, the session had too many people for the room and we should consider splitting it if we have mentors who are comfortable teaching it and we should try to arrange this ahead of time.
* We should be careful to make sure that the advance notice asks everybody to download the project zip file ahead of time. If we're going to do this in class instead, we should set up a short URL to help streamline the process without forcing everybody to head to the wiki for things.
* A bunch of people found the Twitter session too fast so we should try to slow this down.
* TweePy continues to be both poorly documented and opaque. The opaqueness of TweePy was a problem and we may want to create an interface to TweePy that just gives users raw JSON.

'''Wikipedia''' workshop:

* In terms of delivery, there was mixed feedback including some excellent feedback and some who felt that it was too detailed and slow. This mirrored some of our feedback from last time. One approach would be to make the Wikipedia room be a designated "slower" room.
* We should consider graduated challenges that go from less challenging to more and more challenging which might help with the fact there is a range of learning levels.

'''SQL workshop''':

Jonathan ran a session on using SQL. Although this was a diversion from the strong Python focus, it was well attended and appreciated by students trying to build up this skill.

* Generally the session was was very successful and seemed to do a good job of giving people an overview of a data science and a way to hook themselves in to it.
* Next session, if we do this again, we should consider integrating Python more closely into this. We may either close the loop in this session or perhaps split into two sessions: (1) introduction to SQL; and (2) using Python to bring data back into Python (e.g., in Pandas).
* We should consider hosting an open SQL database somewhere.