Data Science 101- Lesson for the Hour of Code

Here is a great lesson I found that relates to data (telling data stories with maps and being a data scientist.  It is a perfect fit to use when partcipating in the hour of code this week.

http://teachingkidsprogramming.org/blog/for-kids/data-science-101-mappin...

1. Get Inspiration — go to the Open Heat Map Gallery site and check out some of the cool data-driven maps that other data scientists have made at http://www.openheatmap.com/gallery.html

2. Learn how to do it – watch a quick video – watch the 2 minute video about how to use the Open Heat Map site at http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZsfCS-TrIko

3. Dream up a data question. Here are some examples to get you started:
     a. In which US states do people who watch my favorite TV show live?
     b. In which countries do people ride the most bicycles?
     c. Where has my favorite band toured over the past 5 years?

4. Find some data – this part is tricky. You’ll have to apply your search skills along with evaluation of the quality of the data you find…Check out some of these public data repositories first.

     a. Freebase (a kind of wikipedia, but for data) — http://www.freebase.com
     b. KDNuggets (list of public data sets) – http://www.kdnuggets.com/datasets/

5. Shape and save the data – you can do this manually in Excel, Google Spreadsheets or you can use tools like Open Refine (found here) — http://openrefine.org/ or Google’s public dataset visualizer at http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory

6. Upload the data – to Open Heat Map — http://www.openheatmap.com/
TIP: make sure your data is in a format that Open Heat Map can ‘understand’ – verify from the documentation found at this location — https://github.com/petewarden/openheatmap/wiki

7. Make your map – creating it is easy if you’ve followed the direcitons up to now

8. Tweak your map – adjust to make it your own

9. Share your map – publish as a URL

 

Here’s a great blog – Data Science 101 — http://datascience101.wordpress.com/

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