Mini Project¶

To prepare for the individual course project, each cohort will collectively work on the development of a mini project. The purpose of this mini project is to practice the skills and techniques that will be needed for the project that each student will define for themselves. The data set for this project will be assigned to the cohort as a whole. On three successive classes the cohort, working as a team, will:

• understand the abstraction created by the data and map the structure of the data
• decide on questions to be answered
• identify limitations imposed by the data on the answers to the questions.
• write the algorithms to produce visualizations to answer these questions
• discuss how the visualizations answer the questions
• discuss the social impacts of the project
• produce a short (4 minute) video of their project

Each student in a cohort should identify a different question to be answered and work on the parts of the project related to that question. For example, the code for manipulating the data set and producing the visualization(s) required to answer that question should be the primary responsibility of the cohort member dealing with that question.

The cohort should not organize its work so that different cohort members are each responsible for one of the bullet items above (e.g., one member maps the data, a second member defines the questions, a third member writes the code, etc.). This organization should not be used because it defeats the purpose of preparing each cohort member to perform all of these steps in the final, individual project that follows. 

At the end, each student will use the rubric to evaluate the project of another cohort.