Teaching data science with puzzles

Of the many coding puzzles on the web, few focus on the programming skills needed for handling untidy data. During my summer internship at RStudio, I worked with Jenny Bryan to develop a series of data science puzzles known as the "Tidies of March." These puzzles isolate data wrangling tasks into bite-sized pieces to nurture core data science skills such as importing, reshaping, and summarizing data. We also provide access to puzzles and puzzle data directly in R through an accompanying Tidies of March package. I will show how this package models best practices for both data wrangling and project management.

Transcript

1. Teaching data science with puzzles rstudio::conf 2019 Irene Steves i_steves isteves irene.rbind.io bit.ly/ds-puzzles
3. Unique puzzle input Answer submission Puzzle text
4. I solved these with R, but boy was it clunky!
5. Let’s make puzzles that highlight what R/the tidyverse are good at!
6. Bite-sized puzzles that focus on core data science skills as championed by the tidyverse set of packages march tidies of
7. SOOTHSAYER. Beware the ides of March. CAESAR. What man is that? BRUTUS. A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March. CAESAR. Set him before me; let me see his face. CASSIUS. Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar. CAESAR. What say'st thou to me now? Speak once again. SOOTHSAYER. Beware the ides of March. CAESAR. He is a dreamer; let us leave him. The Death of Julius Caesar, Vincenzo Camuccini 1771-1844
8. Photo: flickr clement127
9. Wrangling Workflow
10. march tidies of Workflow
12. New R Project
13. @JennyBryan
14. Pre-populated file path here::here() for defining the path Knittable .R file Omit tidyverse messages from html output
15. Auto-generated table of contents
16. The neighborhood sandwich store makes the best sandwiches! They’ve got everything from classics like BLTs to more unusual options like Fluffernutters. Since many of their specialty ingredients keep going bad, they've decided to cut their selection and only focus on their best- selling sandwich. Photo: flickr skywhisperer
17. To help with the decision, the storeowners have collected data on their customers’ favorite sandwiches. Most people listed several varieties (in no particular order). Here’s a sample of the data: In this sample, the Dagwood sandwich is the most popular. In the full dataset, what is the most popular sandwich among the customers?
18. In this sample, the Dagwood sandwich is the most popular.
21. Photo: Wikipedia
24. Beyond the Test cases Parseable and predictable file & folder names Projects & git Reproducible code*
25. Thank you! Irene Steves i_steves isteves irene.rbind.io bit.ly/ds-puzzles