Project Report Due: 9:00am Monday April 21
Project Presentations: Week of April 21
The goals of this project are to work with your team:
To generate and answer some interesting questions using one or more large datasets.
To produce a short report summarizing your findings.
To make a presentation giving more details about your findings to the entire class.
Data for this project come from the American Community Survey(ACS), which is a large survey undertaken by the US Census Bureau in the years between decennial censuses. The ACS data are compiled into 1-year, 3-year and 5-year Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) for each State as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. For this project, you will use the 3-year and/or the 5-year PUMS population records (not the housing unit records) for the State(s) (District, Territory) of your choosing. All information about these data as well as access to the data in zipped .csv files are available from links off of the webpage provided above (or just Google “American Community Survey” to get to that website).
By Wednesday, April 9 at 9:00am: As a group, decide on a list of at least three interesting questions that you would like to address. Be prepared to share and discuss these questions with the entire class.
By Monday, April 21 at 9:00am: Submit a two-page (reasonable margins and font size) document that summarizes the following:
Project/data background and the questions that you addressed.
Your findings including at least one interesting plot.
Obstacles you encountered and useful/interesting solutions to overcoming those obstacles.
Additional questions that you generated and/or future work that you could do with the data your team used.
By the week of April 21: Make a 20 minute presentation of your project. Each presentation must consist of four sections: (1) Overview and Questions of Interest; (2) Findings; (3) Obstacles and Solutions; (4) Future Questions/Work. These sections may not necessarily be of equal length, but the total presentation length must not be longer than 20 minutes. All members of your team must be prepared to deliver all four sections—assignments of which team member will present which section will be determined randomly immediately before the presentation begins.
By 9:00am of the morning your group presents: Email the URL of your group git repo to Charlotte and Alix. It should include your well-documented R-code with which we could completely reproduce the content of your summary report and your presentation, and a .pdf version of your presentation slides.
By Friday, April 25 at 9:50am: Each group member must turn in a completed and signed Group Member Evaluation Form for all other members on his/her team and his/her self.