What is this course?
Computer Mapping is designed to teach you three core skills that will allow you to better understand the world around you.
These include:
Some additional techniques/concepts you will learn include:
The course is designed to allow you to explore your own interests and answer your own questions. Your final capstone-style project (think PBA) will showcase what you have you learned by requiring you to identify an interest, draft a proposal of how to explore that interest, collect and clean the data you will use, analyze the data, and finally create a visualization of findings to share with the class.
The course will follow a repeating model of:
Each skill/concept will be added to your toolbox and will help you produce more interesting and useful mini-projects as you progress throughout the year. Most educational research has demonstrated that repetition of tasks, with intervals in between, leads to the best retention of material. I will endeavor to make skills show up again and again so you will keep them in memory and make completing a final project easier. You cannot cram your way to success in this class.
These include:
- Collecting, sorting/filtering, and exploring data
- Analyzing data to answer a question
- Displaying your findings to share with others
Some additional techniques/concepts you will learn include:
- Creating effective comparisons
- How to ask good questions
- How to design and implement good experiments
- How to deal with confounding variables
- How to effectively visualize data
- How to test hypotheses
The course is designed to allow you to explore your own interests and answer your own questions. Your final capstone-style project (think PBA) will showcase what you have you learned by requiring you to identify an interest, draft a proposal of how to explore that interest, collect and clean the data you will use, analyze the data, and finally create a visualization of findings to share with the class.
The course will follow a repeating model of:
- A short demonstration of the new skill/concept
- Learning the skill/concept
- Practicing the skill/concept
- Use/demonstrate understanding of skill/concept in a short mini-project
Each skill/concept will be added to your toolbox and will help you produce more interesting and useful mini-projects as you progress throughout the year. Most educational research has demonstrated that repetition of tasks, with intervals in between, leads to the best retention of material. I will endeavor to make skills show up again and again so you will keep them in memory and make completing a final project easier. You cannot cram your way to success in this class.
Materials and Equipment
We will be using a variety of freely available software packages and online tools. Your computer does not have to be "bleeding edge" to run the software, but you will benefit from a relatively up to date machine. A solid internet connection is also a must. Some of the software/online sites we will use include:
- Excel or Google Sheets
- Tableau
- ArcGIS Online, Story Maps, Community Analyst, and Survey123
- If you have prior coding experience you may want to incorporate Python or Processing into your work.
Course Requirements and Responsibilities
- Show up for synchronous lessons on time ready to work. I will not record lessons.
- Work through the asynchronous lessons as scheduled. This is important to prevent you falling behind, and to insure that you can determine if you are confused in a timely manner, and seek the help you need.
- Experiment and practice. Have an open mind and be willing to explore lots of options when examining your data.
- Follow protocols for file naming and storage. I will come up with a standardized naming convention for submitted work that you will need to follow.
- Bring your own interests into the class. This class is about exploring and better understanding your world using data. The questions/interests you choose to explore, and share with the class, are up to you.
Course Sequence
Unit 1 - Data Science Fundamentals
Concepts:
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Skills:
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Unit 2 - Tableau
Concepts:
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Skills:
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Assessments:
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Unit 3 - ArcGIS
Concepts:
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Skills:
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Unit 4 - SUMMATIVE PROJECT
Upon learning, and practicing, all the above skills and concepts you will begin your own project. Your project must have a spatial component to it. You will begin by determining an area of interest or problem you wish to address, and then perform the following:
- Define the question or topic of interest
- Propose potential techniques to address your question/interest
- Find, clean, and sort data (or collect your own)
- Summarize and describe the data
- Visualize the data
- Map the data (all projects must have a spatial component to them)
- Perform your specific analysis
- Create a presentation of your findings and your maps/visuals, etc.