Project

Overview of Project for PSYC 167

Project Description

For the data visualization project, your team will writ code in order to analyze data and create data visualizations in order to communicate a story that would address the client’s interest in determining whether COVID has influenced athlete performance. Given the constraints of data to inform this specific question, the project will involve data exploration to tell a story about athlete performance. Given the client has little information about athlete performance, including data visualizations, this exploration allows for a healthy dose of flexibility in team creativity. This open element will also allow teams to develop ideas independently, thereby producing stories that will likely diverge wildly from each other, making the project an exciting foray into data storytelling for many students.

Team Membership and Roles

A team of students will work with a project liaison to develop the project and work together to produce the midterm and final deliverables. Rather than having all students in charge of all duties, team members should consider delegating tasks and various types of workloads to students who are best equipped to handle them either because of ability or because of interest and desire. Teams are to meet weekly and members are to complete individual worklog reports, which are used for final grading.

Deliverables

  • Midterm Presentation
  • Final Presentation
  • Final R Markdown Report
  • Worklogs

Project Evaluation

The project has different components representing it at various stages (e.g., midterm presentation, final presentation and report). See those sections specifically but the following general items will be important to consider.

  • Quality of project deliverable documents (e.g., organization, coherence, story, coding clarity/organization, plots, etc.)
  • Professionalism (e.g., liaison meeting etiquette and responsibility, timely discord communication, non-tardy attendance at weekly team meeting, weekly worklogs, feedback from liaison, etc.)
  • Peer evaluation (e.g., contributions, team player, etc.)

Note: Liaison’s will also participate in evaluating all teams. The team with the most impressive project (e.g., most clear, most useful and actionable, most interesting, most thought provoking, etc.) will receive bonus points.

Presentation Characteristics

See the midterm and final presentation guidelines for more detail and rubrice but in general, the following characteristics will be evaluated.

  1. Clarity: well-explained; easy to follow/understand; ability to communicate points effectively

  2. Organization: structured logically; ability to walk audience through the data journey and communicate a story interpretation about data

  3. Thoroughness: all relevant issues discussed thoroughly

  4. Presentation Style: degree of preparedness and polish in presentation; smooth and rehearsed; minimum of reading; well-paced; slide quality

Weekly Worklog/Report

Tracking individual and team goals weekly ensures progress toward the goal, commitment to the project, accountability for oneself, and a record of accomplishments.

The Project Manager should inquire with the team about the best way to submit worklogs or transparency and review. This could be a Google Doc File, a spreadsheet, or even a Google From that contains questions to answer, which then get dumped into a Google Spreadsheet for all to review.

Frequency of Worklog

Worklogs are to be completed by end-of-day following the team meeting, after communicating future goals (distributed equally) to other team members. Please make public for me to review. Meetings should be physical to facilitate team cohesion and conversation, and limit silly technical issues that just waste meeting time.

Contents of Worklog

Worklogs should contain information about the reporting date, the team member reporting, that member’s previous week accomplishments, and that member’s future week goals

  1. For the past week, I accomplished the following specific goals for my team:
  • This…
  • That…
  • And the other…

  1. For this past week, the number of hours allocated toward those goals was: ___

  2. For this coming week, my specific goals for the team include:

  • This…
  • That…
  • And the other…
  1. If relevant, any items to discuss with liaison.