Datathons: An Experience Report of Data Hackathons for Data Science Education

Large amounts of data are becoming increasingly available through open data repositories as well as companies and governments collecting data to improve decision making and efficiencies. Consequently there is a need to increase the data literacy of computer science students. Data science is a relatively new area within computer science and the curriculum is rapidly evolving along with the tools required to perform analytics which students need to learn how to effectively use. To address the needs of students learning key data science and analytics skills we propose augmenting existing data science curriculums with hackathon events that focus on data also known as datathons. In this paper we present our experience at hosting and running four datathons that involved students and members from the community coming together to solve challenging problems with data from notfor-profit social good organizations and publicly open data. Our reported experience from our datathons will help inf...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: SIGCSE
• Authors: Craig Anslow, John Brosz, Frank Maurer, Mike Boyes
• Keywords: Education, SIGCSE 2016