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
   

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3. Unique puzzle input
   Answer submission
   Puzzle text
   

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4. I solved these
   with R, but boy
   was it clunky!
   

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5. Let’s make puzzles
   that highlight what
   R/the tidyverse are
   good at!
   

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6. Bite-sized puzzles that focus
   on core data science skills as
   championed by the tidyverse
   set of packages
   march
   tidies
   of
   

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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
   

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8. Photo: flickr clement127
   

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9. Wrangling Workflow
   

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10. march
    tidies
    of
    Workflow
    

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12. New R Project
    

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13. @JennyBryan
    

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14. Pre-populated file path
    here::here() for defining the path
    Knittable .R file
    Omit tidyverse
    messages from
    html output
    

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15. Auto-generated
    table of contents
    

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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
    

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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?
    

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18. In this sample, the Dagwood sandwich is the most popular.
    

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21. Photo: Wikipedia
    

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24. Beyond the
    Test cases
    Parseable and
    predictable file &
    folder names
    Projects
    & git
    Reproducible
    code*
    

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25. Thank you!
    Irene Steves
    i_steves isteves
    irene.rbind.io
    bit.ly/ds-puzzles
    

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