Modern statistics is fundamentally a computational discipline, but too often this fact is not reflected in our statistics curricula. With the rise of data science it has become increasingly clear that students want, expect, and need explicit training in this area of the discipline. Additionally, recent curricular guidelines clearly state that working with data requires extensive computing skills and that statistics students should be fluent in accessing, manipulating, analyzing, and modeling with professional statistical analysis software. In this talk, we introduce the design philosophy behind an introductory data science course, discuss in progress and future research on student learning as well as new directions in assessment and tooling as we scale up the course.
Talk given at Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, 20 – 21 April 2023. https://www.datascience.nat.fau.eu/women-in-datascience.