“Playing the Whole Game”: A Data Collection and Analysis Exercise With Google Calendar

Abstract

We provide a computational exercise suitable for early introduction in an undergraduate statistics or data science course that allows students to “play the whole game” of data science: performing both data collection and data analysis. While many teaching resources exist for data analysis, such resources are not as abundant for data collection given the inherent difficulty of the task. Our proposed exercise centers around student use of Google Calendar to collect data with the goal of answering the question “How do I spend my time?” On the one hand, the exercise involves answering a question with near universal appeal, but on the other hand, the data collection mechanism is not beyond the reach of a typical undergraduate student. A further benefit of the exercise is that it provides an opportunity for discussions on ethical questions and considerations that data providers and data analysts face in today’s age of large-scale internet-based data collection.

Keywords:

• Data collection
• Data science
• Education
• Ethics
• Google Calendar
• Statistics

Acknowledgments

Most importantly, we would like to acknowledge the Smith College and Pomona College students with whom we work. It is from their ideas and energy that we discovered the fun and beauty of working in statistics and data science. Hilary Parker and Roger Peng provided not only the inspiration for the activity but also helpful feedback on the preprint. We appreciate the thoughtful suggestions of three anonymous referees and the associate editor. On top of the packages cited in the article, the authors also used the ggplot2 (Wickham, Chang, Henry, Pedersen, Takahashi, Wilke, Woo and Yutani 2019), kableExtra (Zhu 2019), knitr (Xie 2019), and viridis packages (Garnier 2018). We also thank Hadley Wickham for providing the direct inspiration for the “playing the whole game” wording in our article. The authors thank numerous colleagues and students for their support.

Notes

1 The work has been verified by the Smith College Institutional Review Board as “Exempt” according to 45CFR46.101(b)(1): (1) Educational Practices.

2 Both authors were surprised to see that any college student would be able to make it through the semester without any type of calendar at all (3 of 74)!

3 Per Smith College Institutional Review Board guidelines, explicit consent was obtained directly from all students who are confidentially quoted in the article.