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

=== Morning lecture ===

The morning lecture was well received — if delivered too quickly. Unsurprisingly, the example of [http://placekitten.com/ PlaceKitten] as an API was an enormous hit: informative ''and'' cute.

Defining APIs was difficult. First, general ambiguity around the use of the term and the difference between APIs in general and web APIs should be foregrounded. Learners frequently wanted to ask questions like, "Where in this Python program is the API?" It was difficult for some to grasp that the API is the ''protocol'' that describes what a client can ask for and what they can expect to receive back. Preparing a concise answer to this question ahead of time would have been worthwhile. We spent too much time on this in the session.

Although there was some debate among the mentors, if there is one thing we might remove from curriculum for a future session, it would probably be JSON. The reason it seemed less useful is the APIs that most learners plan to use (e.g., Twitter and Wikipedia) already have Python interfaces in the form of modules. In this sense, spending 30 minutes of a lecture to learn how to parse JSON objects seems like a poor use of time.

On the other hand, time spent looking at JSON objects provides practicing think about more complex data structures (e.g., nested lists and dictionaries) which is something that is necessary and that students will otherwise not be prepared for. We were undecided as a group.