DS4UX (Spring 2016)/Schedule

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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):