By Debbie Yuster
Information
In this session, I will demo an exciting format for student reports: blog posts hosted in GitHub Pages, produced in VS Code from Quarto Markdown files with embedded Python code. This format serves many purposes: (1) Fun! The blog post format allows students to use a more casual and engaging tone, include elements like GIFs and callouts, and embed interactive data plots and applets. (2) Reproducibility: Results are generated from students’ source code which is made publicly available, allowing readers to audit and reproduce students’ results. (3) State of the art toolkit: Students gain experience with the latest tools for scientific typesetting and version control. (4) PR: Students end the course with a polished and engaging project report, available to anyone with a web browser, which can be highlighted in applications for jobs and graduate school. The format has been used successfully in Ramapo College’s Data Science Capstone course, in which Data Science majors work on semester-long individual projects. The final deliverable is the “blog post” report, along with an associated GitHub repository of code. Ramapo College is a New Jersey public liberal arts college enrolling 6000 undergraduates. The capstone course enrolls around 10 graduating seniors per year.
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/debbieyuster/ecots24