Workplan and Coaching
You’ll start working on your project in the second course week. The activities below help you to structure your project. Stick to the plan to ensure you can finish the project in time.
Planning
| Week | Activity | Status of your project |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | There’s no project work yet! Do spend some time getting to know your classmates! | |
| 2 | Idea generation (#1) | Explore which data sources may be relevant (challenges #1.1-#1.2) |
| 3 | Data source selection (#2) | Decide which website or API to use (challenges #1.1-#1.3) |
| 4 | Extraction design (#3) | Decide which information to retrieve, for which seeds, at what frequency, and how to process the data during the collection (challenges #2.1-#2.4) |
| 5 | Prototype Development (#4) | Finalize a first, working prototype & get feedback (challenges #3.1-3.3) |
| 6 | Coaching sessions | Meet your coach for feedback, to ensure your data collection runs smoothly |
| 7 | Coaching sessions | Meet your coach for feedback on your code; document your data collection and prepare your submission |
How do coaching sessions work, and how to prepare for them?
During the course, you will have the opportunity to meet up with the course instructor for coaching sessions. These sessions are meant for you to receive feedback on your ideas and code. Frequently, this also entails problem-solving & debugging.
Teams participating in coaching sessions attend the entire session. They typically work together on the team project, and the course instructor will “walk around” to address students’ questions. When on Zoom, breakout rooms will be created. There will be approximately 10 minutes per team in total; some teams may prefer to use the entire time at once, while other teams may prefer to ask multiple, short questions over the entire duration of the session.
This is how to prepare for coaching sessions:
- You get most out of the coaching sessions if you have already done some work on your project.
- If you encounter problems, check whether a solution has been posted already
- e.g., on this website, this YouTube playlist, or the associated YouTube channel
- also conduct your own Google/Stackoverflow search
- Start Jupyter Notebook and load your scripts before the start of the coaching session!
- your “problem” (e.g., error message) needs to be “on the screen”, so that your coach can fiddle around with it. Merely showing a screenshot of an error message does not work.
- When meeting online…
- download & install TeamViewer so that the course instructor can use your keyboard and mouse. Try out a connection with a team member before your first meeting to verify your installation works and you can remote-control your peer’s computer.
- ensure you are sharing the screen with Jupyter Notebook, and join the scheduled session.
- Share in a private message to the course instructor your TeamViewer ID & temporary password.
- Be prepared that the course instructor takes over your screen. Be able to talk (i.e., check your microphone settings before!).
Typical issues to discuss in a coaching session
- How to capture data, and convert it into a proper format for storage (e.g., CSV file, JSON file)?
- How to verify whether all data that should have been downloaded/captured indeed was captured?
- How to schedule/run the data collection for extended periods?
- How to deal with technical hurdles (e.g., authentication, logging in on a site, scrolling)