In April and May of 2024, over 60 universities participated in the American Statistical Association (ASA) DataFest, a celebration of data where teams of undergraduates worked tirelessly over a weekend to explore a large, complex data set from a secret source. This year, the secret data set was CourseKata's anonymized student learning data involving 11 universities, 48 classes, and over 1600 students, which provided a rich resource for insights on introductory statistics, data science, and modeling!
Student Experience at DataFest
The unique "festival" atmosphere of DataFest supports participants as they hack their way through CourseKata's multi-level student response data! With mentors and professors at hand, these students were not just wrangling data and coding up models; they were inventing new ways to understand complex student experiences that occur in real college courses. Fueled by pizza and coffee, hundreds of teams from a diverse range of colleges immersed themselves in CourseKata data, crafted innovative solutions, and went far beyond what they might explore for a class project! This intense, hands-on experience managing big data also forged new collaborations, friendships, and visions of how to make a difference in messy real-world contexts with data.
Creative Projects and Innovation
The variety of projects showcased at DataFest was a testament to the creativity and analytical prowess of the participants. For example, Alex Katopodis, Miles King, Jonathan Levitan, & Jackson Peurach from the Duke University site developed a model to identify learning behaviors of students with adaptive patterns of learning behavior.
Another winning group Chelsea Chen, Justin Gong, Hairan Liang, Lukas Hager, & Terry Ming from the UCLA site built an engine to adjust feedback and specifically direct students to helpful resources!
These are just two of the many creative projects that not only demonstrated the students' ability to apply statistical concepts in sophisticated ways but also their capacity to innovate educational tools that could profoundly influence teaching methodologies!
A student from UCLA, Parth Doshi, whose team won "Best Insight" at the UCLA site wrote in to say: When telling [friends and family] about our work over the weekend, they were beyond excited to know that we were working on it and were glad that our work, even as students, has the potential to have impact the real-world. This is a concept that we are not made familiar with through just coursework so working with actual data helped me (and my team) gain a much richer understanding of what goes on behind the scenes in building something as impactful as CourseKata and for that, I am thankful to you.
Read more about the variety of awesome experiences as reported by student Christoffer Tan (University of Toronto), mentor Nhu Duong (Macquarie University), and Professor/Organizer Victoria Woodward (University of Notre Dame)!
Future Directions and Iterative Improvement
The insights generated by these projects are set to influence the next iteration of CourseKata's textbooks! The continuous cycle of feedback and improvement, showcased at ASA's DataFest 2024, highlights CourseKata's effort to forge a new path for educational materials – changes in digital curricula that are not only informed by data but also by the perspectives of students as researchers!
We thank the participants, mentors, professors, and organizers (especially Rob Gould, Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, Raphaël Morsomme) for all your excellence! And a hearty congratulations to all of our winners!
