DS4UX (Spring 2016)/Schedule

Week 1: March 28

Day 1 plan

Assignments due

• fill out the pre-course survey

Agenda

• Quick introductions — Be ready to introduce yourself and describe your interest and goals in the class.
• Why Programming and Data Science for UX Research? — What this course is about
• Class overview and expectations — We'll walk through this syllabus.
• Group formation — We'll assemble in our peer programming groups for the first time.
• Installation and setup — You'll install software including the Python programming language and run through a series of exercises.
• Interactive lecture: programming concepts 1
• Self-guided tutorial and exercises — You'll work through a self-guided tutorial to practice the basic concepts we introduced in the lecture.

Homework

• Complete Self-guided tutorial and exercises (if you didn't finish this in class).
• Complete CodeAcademy lessons

Resources

• Python for Informatics: Preface and Chapter 1 Why should you learn to write programs?
• Command line cheat sheet — covers basics like ls, pwd, cd and much more.

Week 2: April 4

Day 2 plan

Agenda

• We will review the programming concepts introduced last week as a group.
• We will introduce some new programming concepts into the mix.
• We will play a guessing game (click here to download the code)
• We will use what we have learned so far to cheat at Scrabble.
• We will introduce our first set of Coding Challenges.
• We will take a sneak peak at what a good final project looks like.

Homework

• Complete the second set of CodeAcademy lessons
• Work on the Week 2 coding challenges

Resources

• Python for Informatics: Chapter 2 Variables, expressions and statements and Chapter 3 Conditional execution
• Python data types cheat sheet
• Python loops cheat sheet
• Working within loops
• Wordplay handout
• cdsw-au2015-lecture1-20151010.ogv -- Mako Hill's lecture video from a previous course, which covers most of the concepts from my Week 1 and Week 2 lectures.

Week 3: April 11

Day 3 plan

Agenda

• We will review your feedback from last week
• We will walk through the solutions to the code challenges from last week
• We will introduce some new programming concepts
• We will walk through an example of programming in a UX Research context
• We will begin working on a series of exercises using the Baby Names dataset

Homework

• Day 3 coding challenges

Resources

• go here

Week 4: April 18

Day 4 plan

Agenda

• Week 3 code challenges — We'll briefly walk through the concepts and solutions to the Week 3 coding challenges as a group.
• Day 3 follow up — We will cover some important concepts that we didn't have a chance to cover in depth last week.
• Reading and writing files — we will learn how to read and write basic datafiles with Python.
• Burke-Gilman traffic counter — we will start working with a dataset of bike and pedestrian traffic on the Burke-Gilman trail.
• Wikipedia Notifications survey analysis — We will walk through a real life example that uses the concepts we've developed so far to answer research questions.

Homework

• Day 4 coding challenges (Required) Turn in here!

Resources

• Two video lectures by Mako Hill, which covers most of the concepts from NEXT week's lecture (as well as some useful review):

• cdsw-au2015-lecture2-20151024.ogv
• cdsw-au2015-lecture3-20151107.ogv

Week 5: April 25

Day 5 plan

Assignments due

• Day 4 coding challenge Turn in here!

Agenda

• Week 4 code challenge solutions — We'll walk through the concepts and solutions to the Week 4 coding challenges as a group.
• Lecture 1: What is an API? — Ray will introduce us to APIs ("Application Programming Interfaces").
• Exercise 1: PlaceKitten API — we will write our first API requests using the PlaceKitten API.
• Lecture 2: Using data from APIs in Python — Ray will introduce us to JSON ("JavaScript Object Notation"), a type of data structure that is commonly used by APIs, which can be easily imported into Python and converted to a dictionary for analysis.
• Week 5 project: Introducing the Wikipedia API — We will learn the syntax of the MediaWiki API (used by Wikipedia), as well as how to test API queries in a sandbox, and how to perform those queries in Python—in preparation for the Week 5 coding challenges.
• We will go over a list of sample APIs, datasets, and research questions that will get you thinking about what research you want to conduct for your final class project.

Homework

• Day 5 coding challenge (Update: NOT Required)
• Final project ideas

Resources

• Project Idea Assignment resources: some examples of APIs, datasets, and research questions to help you complete your Final Project Idea Assignment.
• JSON formatter and validator: (useful for examining the structure of large/complex JSON blobs)
• Hurl.it API sandbox: like the Wikipedia API sandbox, but can query many more APIs!
• Two video lectures by Tommy Guy and Mako Hill, which covers most of the concepts from this week (as well as some useful review):

• cdsw-au2015-lecture2-20151024.ogv
• cdsw-au2015-lecture3-20151107.ogv

Week 6: May 2

Day 6 plan

Assignments due

• Final project ideas (Turn in on Canvas)

Agenda

• Panama Papers project — using Wikipedia APIs to gather information related to a breaking news event.

• Click here to download the Panama Papers project

• An interactive lecture introducing the concept of user-defined functions

• Click here to download the lecture slides and code

Homework

• Day 6 coding challenge (Required)

Resources

• Click here to download the solutions to the week 5 coding challenges (the ones that weren't required)

Week 7: May 9

Day 7 plan

Assignments due

• Day 6 coding challenges (Required)

• Click here to download the week 6 challenge solutions

Agenda

• Week 6 coding challenge solutions - Jonathan will review the solutions to the week 6 coding challenges and answer questions
• Writing your own functions - Ray will give a lecture and lead us through a series of interactive exercises on creating custom functions to make our code simpler, clearer, and more flexible.

• Click here to download the lecture slides and code

• Working with location data - Jonathan will introduce some simple techniques for aggregating and visualizing datasets that have a location component, using a corpus of Seattle building permit data.

• Click here to download the building permit code and data

Coding challenges

• Day 7 coding challenges

Week 8: May 16

Day 8 plan

Assignments due

• Final project proposal MOVED FROM WEEK 7

Agenda

• Jupyter notebooks: intro and setup

• paws.wmflabs.org
• CLICK HERE to create a Wikipedia account
• Jupyter intro notebook
• Click here to download today's notebooks (I'm not 100% sure this will work)

• Some new concepts: try/except, sleep(), dateutil.parser, datetime.datetime

• Week 8 new concepts notebook

• Functions II: walk through examples in Jupyter and terminal

• Building permit notebook
• Click here to download the wiki shows demo code
• Wiki-shows notebook

Coding challenges

• No coding challenges this week!

Resources

• Data Science from Scratch, Joel Grus (O'Reilly)

Week 9: May 23

Day 9 plan

Agenda

• We will review the requirements for the Final Presentation and Final Project assignments
• We will review the course as a whole, and what we accomplished
• We will go through 1-2 more examples of how to organize a program into functions
• We will have an opportunity to review key Python concepts as a class
• We will have plenty of time to ask questions about and work on final projects

Resources

• What is 'if __name__ == "__main__"' for? (effbot.org)
• What is use of main method in Python? Can someone explain with example? (Quora.com)

Free (mostly) Python 3 tutorials and reference works

• Dive into Python3
• Learn Python the Hard Way
• Python-Course.EU
• The Python Guru - Beginner's tutorial
• GitBook Python 3 Basics Tutorial
• WikiBooks Non-programmer's Python 3 tutorial
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python (links to many different tutorials!)
• DataQuest Data Analyst interactive course series
• Python for Data Analysis (O'Reilly media book)

Week 10: June 3 (DATE CHANGE)

Please note that this class we will meet from 6pm to 9pm on Friday evening, rather than Monday evening, because of the Memorial Day holiday.

Assignments due

• Final project presentation

Agenda

• Final project presentations

Resources

• one

Week 11: June 6

FINALS WEEK - NO CLASS

Assignments due

• Final project report and code due by midnight on Wednesday, 6/8/2016