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While coursework provides undergraduate data science students with some relevant analytic skills, many are not given the rich experiences with data and computing they need to be successful in the workplace. Additionally, students often have limited exposure to team-based data science and the principles and tools of collaboration that are encountered outside of school.In this paper, we describe the DSC-WAV program, an NSF-funded data science workforce development project in which teams of undergraduate sophomores and juniors work with a local non-profit organization on a data-focused problem. To help students develop a sense of agency and improve confidence in their technical and non-technical data science skills, the project promoted a team-based approach to data science, adopting several processes and tools intended to facilitate this collaboration.Evidence from the project evaluation, including participant survey and interview data, is presented to document the degree to which the project was successful in engaging students in team-based data science, and how the project changed the students' perceptions of their technical and non-technical skills. We also examine opportunities for improvement and offer insight to other data science educators who may want to implement a similar team-based approach to data science projects at their own institutions.
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Self-publishing Biodiversity Data Products on the Web
Biodiversity informatics workbenches and aggregators that make their data externally accessible via application programming interfaces (APIs) facilitate the development of customized applications that fit the needs of a diverse range of communities. In the past, the technical skills required to host web-facing applications placed constraints on many researchers: they either needed to find technical help, or expand their own skills. These limits are now significantly reduced when free or low-cost web-site hosting is combined with small, well-documented applications that require minimal configuration to setup. We illustrate two applications that take advantage of this approach: an interactive key engine (presently named "distinguish") and TaxonPages, a taxon page service application. Both applications make use of TaxonWorks' API. We discuss the limits, e.g., the user must be online to access the data behind the application, and advantages of this approach, e.g., the application server can be served locally, on the users' own computer, and the underlying data are all accessible in more technical formats.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1639601
- PAR ID:
- 10383099
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Biodiversity Information Science and Standards
- Volume:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 2535-0897
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.6.94061
