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):

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):

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.