Skills, Teaching Methods Chris Burnage Skills, Teaching Methods Chris Burnage

Five principles to get undergraduates involved in real-world data science projects

As a D-Lab and Data Science Education Program Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley in Spring 2020, I helped to ensure and enhance the quality of more than 40 Data Science Discovery Projects, working with community partners and undergraduate research assistants. The goal of these projects was to connect undergraduates with community impact groups, entrepreneurship ventures, and educational initiatives across UC Berkeley and provide them with hands-on and team-based research opportunities outside the classroom.

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Skills, Teaching Methods Chris Burnage Skills, Teaching Methods Chris Burnage

Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science launch online festival open to all

For the past few years in June, the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (SICSS) have seen students gather across the world at partner locations and in the designated primary location to begin a two-week program of collaboration, workshops, lectures, and participant-led research projects in computational social science (CSS). The strange times of COVID have somewhat altered these plans with some partner locations postponing until 2021 and some opting to move online. Whether virtual or postponed the fourth iteration of SICSS set a new record for partner locations—a total of 22 locations signed up to take part. Founders Matt Salganik and Chris Bail, allow participants to only attend once but as attendance has grown so have graduates returning to their institutions and setting up new partner locations.

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How Can Smart Use of Graphics Cut Through the Complexity of COVID-19?

To try and cut through the tangles of complexity wrought by a global pandemic, I’ve been working with Peter Evans (and his multi-talented daughter, Hamsi Evans) to put together some picture ‘explainers’ to help frame thinking. These are helping communicate around the complex problems we’re all facing and how to use social science research to tackle these.

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