Individual Project Introduction

Do something cool/hard

Dr. Eric Friedlander

College of Idaho
CSCI 2025 - Winter 2026

Individual Project Introduction

Individual Project: TLDR

• Find an interesting dataset
• Do something cool/hard with it
• Present your findings to the class
• Deliverables:
  • Quarto document with code and narrative
  • Project Defense: 5-minute presentation followed by Q&A
  • All your work will be uploaded to a Github assignment
• Goal: Practice your skills and learn something new

Basic (Mostly Vibes Based) Requirements

• Dataset must be REAL (e.g. no simulated data)
• Project must be “substantial” # vibes
  • Takes times to complete (if you start this the night before it’s due, I don’t care how good your analysis is)
  • You learn something new (i.e. something we didn’t cover in class)
• You must challenge yourself # vibes
  • Looks different for everyone

Taking Risks is OK

I spent a ton of time on this and couln’t quite get it to work by the deadline. - Future You Maybe

• It’s OK to try something hard and fail

Way’s you can fail

• You have nothing to show during class check-ins
• You don’t turn in your work on time
• You demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of your project when you present

Ideas

• Creating your own Shiny App/Dashboard
• Learning to use a new plotting package (e.g. plotly) or software (e.g. Python)
• Using APIs to get data (e.g. Twitter API)
• Scraping data from the web

Today: Soft Launch

• Hard launch: next week
• Today: brainstorm project ideas and datasets