[Showme-devel] ShowMeBox: Aim and audience?

[Bernelle Verster]

Hi all

Reading Kris's notes:
* The competition Two Sigma ran was very much aimed at people already
experienced in programming (from invite email: "You're invited to
participate ... based on your strong quantitative and programming
background").
* It also ran over 24 hours only (e.g. during Debian Day - weekend).
* Invites were sent less than one month before the competition and no
prior preparation was required (I think).

So two questions before I can even start adapting and putting this on wiki.
(FYI, I dumped the stuff I typed from his pdf below.)

1. Audience
Am I correct in saying the audience we are targeting are
* high school students,
* possibly no prior experience with programming
* possibly no prior access to computers

This means that they need time to prepare - the 'three months' that
Siri suggested, Do we want to work this into a 24 hour sprint finale
somehow? (see question 2)

Do we require them to work in teams? (the TwoSigma one did require
this) My opinion is no, we can encourage it but it's hard to do,
especially if you are geographically isolated.

2. What is happening DURING DebConf?
The competition structure of the TwoSigma competition, that is,
running the actual competition during DebConf may work well - it gives
audience interest, especially if we rig up screens that update the
visualisation live. BUT we cannot expect this level of confidence from
high school students. So we may duplicate the competition with
experienced programmers?? Or partner them up with the high school
students in a new challenge? (this may be the start of lifelong
mentoring if done well)

IF we ONLY do high school students, what would be happening during
DebConf? Only an awards ceremony and the art exhibition showcasing
their work? This is fine but also boring and not interactive.
Thoughts?

Cheers
B



_________________________________________________________
text from Two Sigma Beaker competition "Two Sigma Connect - Data
Analysis and Beaker Contest FAQs"

<About Us>

Competition Schedule
Thursday, 16 April: The competition kicks off at 6pm. Activities for
the night include networking sessions, dinner, and an overview of
tournament rules before prepping laptops and returning to the hotel at
9pm.
Friday, 17 April: The competition starts at 9am and will run for 24
hours. Food will be provided throughout the day and Two Sigma mentors
will be on hand to give advice and guidance.
Saturday, 18 April: After closing the competition period at 9am there
will be a Project Expo for teams to demo their submissions. Lunch,
networking, and the award ceremony will follow, wrapping up at 2pm.

Competition structure:
Team competition, you will be randomly assigned to a 3-person group by
an impartial algorithm
You will not be able to participate solo. ("At Two Sigma, we
constantly collaborate across multiple departments to create products
and we hope the team environment will provide you a glimpse of the
nature of our work"
Type of data, what kind of data will be accessible?
"New York City's transportation network provides vast amounts of data
to work with, and we will be providing data sets related to it on
Friday morning. You will have access to data such as taxi trip data,
subway entrances and exists and bike share rides. Please feel free to
use any publically available datasets that are relevant to produce
your insights.

You will be provided with a few datasets from NYC Open Data on Friday
morning when the competition begins. Please feel free to use relevant
data sets as you see fit to produce your insights.

*Technical requirements*
Will I need my own laptop? (Yes, with all necessary programs
installed) <Link to install Beaker>
The Beaker Development Team will be on site during the tournament to
help out should you face any issues.

You are free to use any programming language of your choice for
analysis and visualisation. Same goes for libraries.
If you would like to use Beaker, we support a variety of commonly used
data science languages from Python to R to JavaScript and many others.
For a full list of supported languages, please visit http://beakernotebook.com

Using Beaker is not required (although recommended)
It is our open source notebook-style development environment, and we
are excited to see how you might use it to conduct sophisticated data
analysis and create innovative visualisations.
Keep in mind as well that one of the three award categories is for the
Best Beaker Application.

Travel and Accommodation
"In appreciation of your participation, Two Sigma will cover the cost
of your trip if you choose to go through our travel agency and stay in
our reserved hotel (Thu,Fri,Sat).
If you elect to make your own arrangements, you will be responsible
for them, any costs incurred for independent travel and/or
accommodation will not be included or reimbursed.
<Hotel>
<meals>

The invites went out, RSVP's were needed by March 23, less than a
month before the competition (16 April)

Prices include: Best data interpretation, Best Visualisation, Best
Beaker Application
(Beaker is our polyglot web-based IDE allowing you to work in many
languages simultaneously. It's targeted at research, data analysis,
and visualization, but it's open source and you can use it to do
almost anything.