(Also available in CODAP)
Students learn about Categorical and Quantitative data, are introduced to Tables by way of the Animals Dataset, and consider what questions can and cannot be answered with available data.
Lesson Goals |
Students will be able to…
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Student-facing Lesson Goals |
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Materials |
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Preparation |
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Supplemental Resources |
- categorical data
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data whose values are qualities that are not subject to the laws of arithmetic
- comments
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messages in the code, generally ignored by the computer, to help people interacting with the code understand what it is doing
- data row
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a structured piece of data in a dataset that typically reports all the information gathered about a given individual
- data science
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the science of collecting, organizing, and drawing general conclusions from data, with the help of computers
- header
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the titles of each column of a table, usually shown at the top
- identifier column
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a column of unique values which identify all the individual rows (e.g. - student IDs, SSNs, etc)
- programming language
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a set of rules for writing code that a computer can evaluate
- quantitative data
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number values for which arithmetic makes sense
🔗Questions that Matter 20 minutes
Overview
Students look at opening questions, either at their desks or in a walk around the room. They select a question they are personally interested in, and think about the data required to answer that question. This process draws a direct line between answering questions they care about and the basics of data science.
Launch
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Look at the provided list of Opening Questions, and take one minute to select a question that grabs your attention. Arrange yourselves into groups based on the question you like, making sure that each group has between 2-5 people.
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Have each person in the group quickly share their gut reaction: What do you think the answer is?
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After sharing, have each person share their reasoning.
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Does everyone in your group agree about the answers to their question?
Note: Students are VERY likely to try and explain their reasoning when they give their gut answers. This can taint the answers of other students in the group - emphasize that this is about exposing our "gut reaction" or bias.
Investigate
What information would you collect to answer the question you selected? Take 5 minutes to think about what information you would need to collect, to find the answer.
Common Misconceptions
Students may lean towards questions about individuals, instead of questions about what’s true for a group of individuals who vary from one to another. For example, instead of wondering what movie gets the highest rating, they should ask what’s the typical rating for movies in a list, or how much those ratings tend to vary.
Synthesize
For each group…
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What were your gut reactions?
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Did the question wind up being too vague? What did you need to do to make it specific?
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What data would you gather?
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What, if anything, were you surprised about?
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If we wanted to find out if small schools are better than big schools, for example, we might want to gather data on SAT scores, college acceptance, etc. Each of these is a variable in our dataset: any two schools we look at could vary by each of them.
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We can’t survey every school in the world (or get data on every movie ever made, or every police action!) but we can analyze a sample of them, and try to infer something about all of them as a whole.
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These questions quickly turn into a discussion about data — how you assess it, how you interpret the results, and what you can infer from those results.
The process of learning from data is called Data Science. Data science techniques are used by scientists, business people, politicians, sports analysts, and hundreds of other different fields to ask and answer questions about data.
We’ll use a programming language to investigate these questions. Just like any human language, programming languages have their own vocabulary and grammar that you will need to learn. The language you’ll be learning for data science is called Pyret.
Optional: Which Questions can we Answer? Datasets are useful for answering questions, but they can’t answer all the questions that we will wonder about for a given topic. In this activity students will look at a small dataset about a cyclist’s training rides and think about how they could use the table to answer each question or why a question cannot be answered using the table. |
Which of you like to ride bikes? What data might you collect about bike rides? Open to What Questions Can You Answer with the Given Data? This page includes a small dataset about a cyclist’s training rides and a set of questions. The data can be used to answer some, but not all, of the questions. With your partner, read each question. If it can be answered with what we know, explain how you could use the table to answer it. If it can’t be answered using the table, explain why not. |
🔗Meet the Animals! 25 minutes
Overview
Students explore the Animals Dataset, sharing observations and familiarizing themselves with the idiosyncrasies and patterns in the data. In the process, they learn about Categorical and Quantitative data.
Notice and Wonder Pedagogy This pedagogy is a widely-used best practice in Math-Ed, and is used throughout this course. In the "Notice" phase, students are asked to crowd-source their observations. No observation is too small or too silly! Students may notice that the animals table has corners, or that it’s printed in black ink. But by listening to other students' observations, students may find themselves taking a closer look at the dataset to begin with. The "Wonder" phase involves students raising questions, but they must also explain the context for those questions. Sharon Hessney (moderator for the NYTimes excellent What’s going on in this Graph? activity) sometimes calls this "what do you wonder…and why?". Both of these phases should be done in groups or as a whole class, with time given to each. |
Launch
Open the Animals Spreadsheet in a browser tab, or turn to The Animals Dataset in your workbook.
Investigate
🖼Show image
This table contains data from an animal shelter, listing animals that have been adopted. We’ll be analyzing this table as an example throughout the course, but you’ll be applying what you learn to a dataset you choose as well.
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Turn to Questions and Column Descriptions in your Student Workbook. What do you Notice about this dataset? Write down your observations in the first column.
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Sometimes, looking at data sparks questions. What do you Wonder about this dataset, and why? Write down your questions in the second column.
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There’s a third column, called “Answered by Dataset” — circle "Yes" if your Wonder can be answered by the dataset or "No" if it can’t.
Have students share back their noticings (statements) and wonderings (questions), and write them on the board. Ask the class if each Wonder can be answered by the data, making sure that they have a few questions that can be answered, and a few that can’t.
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If you look at the bottom of the Animals Spreadsheet, you’ll see that this document contains multiple sheets. One is called
"pets"and the other is called"README". Which sheet are we looking at? -
Each sheet contains a table. For our purposes, we only care about the animals table on the
"pets"sheet.
Any two animals in our dataset may have different ages, weights, etc. Each of these is called a variable in the dataset. Data Scientists work with two broad kinds of data: Categorical Data and Quantitative Data. Sometimes it can be tricky to figure out if data is categorical or quantitative, because it depends on how that data is being used!
We use Categorical Data to answer “what kind?”, and Quantitative Data to answer "how much?".
Categorical Data is used to classify, not measure. The laws of arithmetic do not make sense when it comes to categorical data.
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“Species” is a categorical variable, because we can ask questions like “which species does Mittens belong to?"
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We couldn’t ask if “cat is more than lizard” and it doesn’t make sense to "find the average ZIP code” in a list of addresses.
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What are some other categorical variables you see in this table?
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Name, Sex, and Fixed
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Quantitative Data is used to measure an amount of something, or to compare two pieces of data to see which is less or more.
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"Pounds" is a quantitative variable, because we can talk about whether one animal weighs more than another or ask what the average weight of animals in the shelter is.
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If we want to ask “how much” or “which is most”, we’re talking about Quantitative Data.
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What are some other quantitative variables in this table?
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Age, Legs, Weight, and Time to Adoption
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Complete Categorical or Quantitative?. Be sure to discuss your answers with your partner or group!
Synthesize
Data Science is all about using a smaller sample of data to make educated guesses about a larger population. It’s important to remember that tables are only a sample of a larger population: this table describes some animals, but obviously it isn’t every animal in the world! Still, if we took the average age of the animals from this particular shelter, it might tell us something about the average age of animals from other shelters.
🔗Meet Pyret! 10 minutes
Overview
Students open up the Pyret environment (code.pyret.org, or "CPO") and see the Animals Dataset reflected there.
Launch
🖼Show image
Let’s take a look at our programming environment, and see what the Animals Dataset looks like there.
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Open the Animals Starter File in a new tab. Click “Connect to Google Drive” to sign into your Google account. This will allow you to save Pyret files into your Google Drive.
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Next, click the "File" menu and select "Save a Copy". This will save a copy of the file into your own account, so that you can make changes and retrieve them later.
Investigate
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Click "Run" to tell Pyret to read the code on the left-hand side.
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On the right-hand side, type
animals-tableand hit the "Enter" or "Return" key. -
What happens?
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A table appears of animals appears on the right-hand side of the screen.
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Look on the left-hand side of the screen. Where is Pyret getting
animals-tablefrom?
The first line on the left-hand side of the screen tells Pyret to use a provided file, which contain tools we’ll want to use for this course.
use context shared-gdrive("Bootstrap-DataScience-…")
After that, we see a line of code that defines shelter-sheet to be a spreadsheet.
shelter-sheet = load-spreadsheet("https://docs.google.com….")
This table is loaded from Google Drive, so now Pyret can see the same spreadsheet you do. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that the address listed here is the same address as the spreadsheet we just looked at!
What Happens when Pyret loads a spreadsheet?
This kind of tedious busywork - or the inability to undo a mistake - is problematic for students, teachers, and Data Scientists alike! For younger students, the strictness of programming may outweigh the benefits. But for students who are comfortable writing code, programming is a vastly more powerful and learner-friendly tool for Data Science! |
After that, we see the following code:
# load the 'pets' sheet as a table called animals-table
animals-table = load-table: name, species, sex, age, fixed, legs, pounds, weeks
source: pets-sheet.sheet-by-name("pets", true)
endThe first line (starting with #) is called a Comment. Comments are notes for humans, which the computer ignores. The next line defines a new table called animals-table, (loaded from the shelter-sheet!) and defines column names: name, species, sex, age, fixed, legs, pounds and weeks. We could use any names we want for these columns, but it’s always a good idea to pick names that make sense!
Even if your spreadsheet already has column headers, Pyret requires that you name them in the program itself.
Every table is made of cells, which are arranged in a grid of rows and columns. The first row and first column are special. The first row is called the header row, which gives a unique name to each variable (or “column”) in the table. The first column in the table is the identifier column, which contains a unique ID for each row. Often, this will be the name of each individual in the table, or sometimes just an ID number.
Below is an example of a table with one header row and two data rows:
| name | species | sex | age | fixed | legs | pounds | weeks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
"Sasha" |
"cat" |
"female" |
1 |
false |
4 |
6.5 |
3 |
"Mittens" |
"cat" |
"female" |
2 |
true |
4 |
7.4 |
1 |
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How many variables are listed in the header row for the Animals Dataset? What are they called? What is being used for the identifier column in this dataset?
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There are eight variables listed: name, species, sex, age, fixed, legs, pounds, and weeks.
nameis the identifier column.
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Try changing the name of one of the columns, and click "Run". What happens when you look at the table?
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The column name also gets changed on the table.
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What happens if you remove a column from the list? Or add an extra one?
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When I remove a column, I get this message: "Loaded worksheet has 8 columns, but 7 column names were given." When I add a column, I get this message: "Loaded worksheet has 8 columns, but 9 column names were given."
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After the header, Pyret tables can have any number of data rows. Each data row has values for every column variable (nothing can be left empty!). A table can have any number of data rows, including zero, as in the table below:
| name | species | sex | age | fixed | legs | pounds | weeks |
|---|
Pyret lets us use many different kinds of data. In the animals table, for example, there are Numbers (the number of legs each animal has), Strings (the species of the animal), and Booleans (whether it is true or false that an animal is fixed).
Synthesize
Once you know how to program, you can do a lot with datasets:
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Data Scientists display tables as all kinds of charts and graphs. For example, we might want to make a pie chart showing how many animals of each species we have.
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Sometimes they want to filter a table, showing only a few of the rows. For example we might only want to look at animals where
speciesis equal to"dog". -
Or perhaps we want to build a column! For example, there could be a vaccination for all cats under the age of 3, and we want to add a
needs-vaccinecolumn that saystruefor cats under the age of 3, andfalsefor everyone else.
In this course, you’ll learn how to do all three: Display, Filter, and Build.
These materials were developed partly through support of the National Science Foundation,
(awards 1042210, 1535276, 1648684, and 1738598). 
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