As I write this it is 1:00 PM on Saint Patrick’s day in Blacksburg Virginia, four blocks from the Virginia Tech campus. In a few hours I will leave my home to join a large gathering of undergraduate students. You would be forgiven if you assumed we’d meet downtown to drink every green beer in sight. Instead, these students have traded the usual St. Paddy’s Day revelries to compete in DataFest, a 48 hour data analysis competition sponsored by the American Statistical association. An anonymous technology company partner has provided a 7 million row 42 column data set. The analysis of these data forms the basis of the competition between undergraduate teams. My colleague and friend Christian Lucero organized the VT event. Faculty volunteers serve as “Expert Advisers,” which will be my role. In addition to providing whatever potentially helpful guidance I can, I have some burning questions of my own for the students.
Namely, why have you chosen to engage in a weekend long St. Patrick’s Day-straddling data analysis competition that lies outside of your academic commitments and other responsibilities?
What does a competition like DataFest provide that motivates participation? Professors spend substantial effort trying to maximize classroom attendance and engagement. Is there something we can learn from DataFest that might help us create educational content that appeals to students? Will the DataFest participants articulate their motivations elegantly such that other students could be challenged to adopt similar views?
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I was not surprised to learn that the students who enrolled in the competition are highly motivated self-starters. Students in the competition ranged from freshmen to seniors. They gave a number of interesting answers to my question about their motivation. Virtually every student I spoke with described a desire to get “real” experience with big data. Summarizing by academic level, this was articulated in distinct ways. For instance, one freshman described a desire to “try out” data analytics to make sure they liked it before advancing too much further in their studies. Upper class students described a desire to obtain experience that would be useful in the job market. A number of students said they were enjoying the contest due to the realistic data setting, where a smaller set said they liked the group-oriented approach and fact that participation was not linked to a classroom grade. A similarly small set described a competitive motivation, wishing to determine how well they “stack up” against their peers.
It was refreshing to spend time with students who are future-oriented and proactive to the extent that they spent the whole weekend analyzing data for experience and fun. Can any of these observations be useful to motivate classroom behavior? I don’t know. I wish I could copy motivation from this highly driven set of students and paste it into the desires of all students. Perhaps the best strategy was one Christian Lucero used. Her adjusted his class assignments and exams in such a way as to make participation in DataFest easier on the students. Smart. I think I will follow his lead by easing the course load in my classes around DataFest next year to encourage more students to participate.