Partnering with Computer Scientists to Develop and Teach a Statistical Computing Course

• Activity Number: 480
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Paul Roback*+ and Olaf Hall-Holt and Kevin Sanft
• Companies: St. Olaf College and St. Olaf College and St. Olaf College
• Keywords: undergraduate curriculum ; statistical computing ; computer science ; data science

Abstract

How can a small statistics program expand its course offerings to include statistical computing when no resources are easily available for a new course? Our answer was to partner with colleagues in computer science. The computer science program offered to develop (in conjunction with statisticians) a "statistics-infused" version of introductory computer science. This new course, taught (so far) by faculty members in computer science, introduces students to key foundational ideas in computer science by using R and Python and motivating the ideas through a data analysis context. Students learn about functions, loops, matrices, text strings, data scraping, and SQL while also discovering data visualization and classification methods. In this talk, we will discuss how an interdisciplinary team designed the initial offering, what content we cover, and what successes have been experienced and lessons have been learned during our first two semesters of implementation.