Kaggle as a Course

• Activity Number: 575
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistical Education
• Author(s): Michael Schuckers*
• Companies: St. Lawrence University
• Keywords: kaggle ; data science ; capstone ; munging ; competitions

Abstract

St. Lawrence University is a liberal arts college of approximately 2450 students with a very active Statistics minor of approximately 40 students per year within the Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics Department. All senior majors in the department are required to take a senior capstone experience. During the Spring semester of 2013, I offered 'Kaggle As a Course' as a senior seminar capstone. Kaggle in this case is the website kaggle.com which `is the world's largest community of data scientists' where data scientists `compete with each other to solve complex data science problems...'(kaggle.com/about). The focus of the course was to have students compete in current or ongoing kaggle competitions. In this talk I will describe the opportunities and challenges, the rewards and drawbacks about using kaggle as a basis for a course.