Data Science at UCSB

Spring Novice Group -- General Info

Welcome to the novice project group! I hope you are excited. The best way to learn these skills is to apply them to a project. Besides that, we hope that you will learn some basic teamwork and delegation skills along the way. It is important that you are honest about what you do and do not know. "Fake it 'till you make it" won't work here... and neither will your code!

Jason will be in this room every meeting to act as a friendly resource for questions and guidance. He will not give lectures or walk you through step-by-step. There are three project outlines, one of each on data visualization, web scraping, and basic machine learning. If you have a different idea for a project, there will be a time during the first meeting to pitch your idea and recruit group members.

Rules

• You are not allowed to do homework in this room
  • If you and a teammate happen to have a midterm tomorrow, study in a different room
• Never laugh at a teammate's question
  • Really this is just good teamwork
  • Feel the room. If your team has a dynamic where you pull each other's chains, then by all means

Forming Teams

To get things started, we will get everyone up and moving about the room. Get ready for some cheesy ice-breakers! Also, you must be brutally honest about your knowledge. It is no problem if you are coming in fresh with no experience--but it is a problem if you lie and tell others that you are well-versed in a programming language. It is time to self-assess your skill level.

• Either 2, 3, or 4 members per team
  • History has shown that groups bigger than 4 fall apart
  • My personal suggestion is a team of 3
• Try to get a mix of majors
• Pick either Python or R as a team
  • The data visualization project is designed for R
  • The webscraping project is designed for Python
  • The machine learning project can be done with either Python or R
• Exchange contact information
  • Phone number
  • Add each other on Facebook
  • Email addresses
• Get started with GitHub! This may be a difficult process for some of you. If you get stuck, ask your team members. If the whole team is stuck, ask Google. If you can't find the answer through Gooogle, ask Jason.
  • Git is how people share and create code in the real world
  • Walk through this tutorial to set up Git on your personal computers. Do not use GitHub Desktop, it is time to get comfortable on the command line.
    • You will have to set up SSH keys.
  • Follow each other on GitHub, of course
  • Try creating a Git repository through the web browser on your account, include a README.md. Then clone the repository through the command line. Check that the README.md file is there. Now add a file to the repository from the command line using touch test.txt. Then add it, commit it, and push it. Does test.txt appear on the GitHub repo page in the web broswer?
• Before leaving, make sure you all have decided on a project. Assign some duties for everyone to do before the next meeting. Perhaps everyone should do X amount of exercises on DataCamp?