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