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 use what we know 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'll walk through the concepts and solutions to the code challenges from last week as a group.
• Interactive lecture - reading and writing datafiles, dictionaries
• We'll explore dataset and research question options for the Final Project assignments.
• We'll 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

• We'll walk through the concepts and solutions to the code challenges from last week as a group.
• Interactive lecture - background of web APIs; requesting web pages with requests, JSON, and writing to files.
• We'll discuss the Final Project Idea assignment (due next week!)
• We'll begin working on a series of projects using the Wikipedia API.

Homework

• Day 4 coding challenges
• Final Project Idea

Resources

• Python for Informatics: Chapter 12 Networked programs and Chapter 13 Using Web Services

Week 5: April 25

Day 5 plan

Assignments due

• Final project idea

Agenda

• Day 5 lecture - visualizing web data
• Introduction to Jupyter notebooks
• graphing data with matplotlib

Homework

• Python quiz #5
• Day 5 coding challenges

Resources

• go here

Week 6: May 2

Day 6 plan

Agenda

• Day 6 lecture - querying databases

Homework

• Day 6 coding challenges

Resources

• go here

Week 7: May 9

Day 7 plan

Assignments due

• Final project proposal

Agenda

• Day 7 lecture - corpus analysis

Coding challenges

• Day 7 coding challenges

Resources

• go here

Week 8: May 16

Day 8 plan

Agenda

• Day 8 lecture - statistics with scipy

Coding challenges

• Day 8 coding challenges

Resources

• go here

Week 9: May 23

Day 9 plan

Agenda

• Day 9 lecture - research study design
• review of key concepts and tools from this course
• presentation workshop

Resources

• go here

Week 10: June 3 (DATE CHANGE)

Please note that this class we will meet Friday evening, rather than Monday evening, because of the Memorial Day holiday.

Assignments due

• Final project presentation

Agenda

• Day 10 lecture - Final project report review, next steps for Data Science
• Final project presentations

Week 11: June 6

FINALS WEEK - NO CLASS

Assignments due

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