Hello HONG and team! I think what your team did during COVID pandemic was fantastic. I admire how you were able to use the pandemic as an opportunity for students to analyze important data sets and write their own reports. Data analytics in today's world is such an important skill to have, especially given our inevitable reliance on technology and big data. Seeing that you are promoting this to young students is truly amazing!

Throughout this 5-day boot camp, what would you say were some of the biggest challenges you faced? And how did you overcome them? Thanks, and great job!

Hello Luiz, Thanks for your kind words. The most challenging part is how to help the individual students to troubleshoot their individual projects, especially when students tried to use specialized data sets related to their specific projects. We had 40 ~ 70 participants during the 5 days, but only a handful of experienced TAs. I wish we could have more TAs to provide one-on-one tutoring. I am amazed that ~25 students wrote final reports and did video presentations. We offered the coding Bootcamp just before Christmas, and some would-be participants might be preoccupied with holiday events, (which are not advised during the pandemic, but that's the reality). 

Our CoLab based notebooks for the bootcamp are available at https://github.com/hongqin/R-covid19-bootcamp-2...

Hello Hong, how wonderful you made use of highly relevant data to teach important skills, and with an impressive range of participants as well. I'm wondering about the details of the bootcamp. Did students need to have some programming background?  Also, I'm wondering about the course content, what you actually taught and then how students developed their questions that they investigated for their projects. 

Great way to teach data science by grounding it in local context around COVID. I was wondering what kinds of prior programming experience did students need to be able to participate in the boot camps? What was the background of teachers who participated? 

I am wondering if the program covered design principles for creating effective data visualizations? 

Hello Hong. Exciting to learn about this project, and analyzing regional COVID19 data sets with R codes on Google Co-Lab. I'm curious about your research approach, did the specific tools used to visualize these heterogeneous data sets help students better understand R coding? 

Hi David. The bootcamp was meant to raise the awareness and interests of students in data science. We had daily surveys to gauge students' participation and engagement. We also require a final report and video presentation. 

Thanks for sharing a very interesting and timely project, Hong. I am glad that you included different age groups of students. Did you compare the reasoning difference across age groups? Particularly how different age groups use data differently and how they interpret them differently? I am interested to see if there is any reasoning pattern difference across age groups for emerging topics like COVID that matter to all people's life experiences.