Mini-projects & Assessment Menu

Mini-projects are organized through the D2MR centralized assessment repository. Information found on the page, along with extra details about the technical stuff, can be found in the README of the repo

Overview

“Mini-projects” are a collection of many semi-structured and open-ended projects that you can complete to demonstrate your understanding of the course material. These projects are designed to be flexible and allow you to focus on the skills that are most interesting and useful to you.

You will meet the same objectives in the mini-projects as in the final research project, giving you the opportunity to show that you can apply the skills you learn to more than one context.

Grading breakdown

You can earn up to 40 objectives-based points across multiple “mini-projects”, chosen from the assessment menu.

The first 20 points must be demonstration of 20 unique objectives. An additional 20 points may be earned in one or more of the following ways:

• Demonstrating additional assessed standards
  • These can be repeats of standards you’ve already demonstrated in another assignment, but you can only earn points for each standard once per assignment
• Demonstrating unassessed learning objectives
  • These objectives are things I hope you will come away from the class having learned but that you are not required to demonstrate in your research project
• Completing an “off-the-syllabus” (OtS) project
  • You can take the initiative to independently learn a few skills beyond the scope of this class. The assessment menu has several suggestions for OtS projects, but you can tailor this to your specific interests. This is a chance to develop the skills that are most interesting and useful to you.
• You can go “off the menu” and design your own mini-projects, but you must receive approval from the professor before beginning an OtM project.

In theory you could earn all 40 points in a single assignment, but that would be a project even bigger than your independent course project. You have a full quarter to complete these assignments, so you can pace yourself and choose the assignments that are most interesting and useful to you. Most students will complete 3-5 of these mini-projects.

Mini-projects engagement

You can earn up to 10 engagement points across all mini-projects. These points are awarded for demonstrating effort above and beyond the minimum requirements. This can include things like:

• Completing optional practice exercises
• Integrating work from a previous assignment into another
• Answering in-assignment questions/prompts with particularly thoughtful responses
• Demonstrating a high level of understanding of the material
• Demonstrating a high level of creativity in your work
• Including a written reflection on your work in the assignment (in the assessment.md file)
• Collaborating with classmates on the assignment in a novel way (e.g., working together on a multi-person assessment option)

Centralized assessment repository

Detailed instructions for using the centralized repo to complete and submit mini-projects are included in the README file of the centralized assessment repository.

Briefly, you will complete mini-projects in the subdirectories of your forked repository, then submit a link to the subdirectory on Canvas. Your grader will review your work and provide feedback in the assessment.md file in that project’s directory.

Project types

Mini-projects will mostly fall into one of the following categories: guided exercises, open-ended projects, or off-the-menu projects. The menu overview below discusses these in more detail, but here’s a quick summary of the mechanics for completing and submitting them:

Guided exercises

These projects will have a Quarto notebook that will guide you through the project, like leveled data cleaning exercises. The notebook will include instructions, code snippets, and explanations to help you complete the project. Unless otherwise stated, all aspects of the project should complete these projects in the Quarto notebook.

Open-ended projects

These projects will have a README.md file that will provide a general description of the project and some guidance on how to approach it. Provided it is sensible to do so, you will put your work in that same directory, in whatever form it takes.

In some cases it’s won’t make sense (or even be possible) to complete the project in the directory of your centralized assessment repo. For example, mini-projects that require some kind of “publication” (like a website or Quarto APA manuscript) will need to exist in their own dedicated repositories; they can’t run as subdirectories another repo.

In those cases, you should still add and complete an assessment.md file in the associated project directory (here in the centralized repo), which will include any necessary information about how to access your work.

Off-the-menu projects

You can also design your own “off-the-menu” projects. To do so, create a new directory in the repository, name it appropriately, and add a copy of the otm-proposal.md file from the your forked repo’s root. Instructions for completing and submitting the proposal via Canvas are included in that document.

Once approved, you can start working on the project. When you submit your finished project, you’ll follow the same process as the on-the-menu projects, but you’ll be resubmitting to the same assignment on Canvas that you submitted your proposal to.

Submitting mini-projects

When you finish a mini-project, you should complete the assessment.md file in the project subdirectory, then submit a link to that subdirectory on Canvas.

Submit to any one of your 10 mini-project assignments on Canvas (whichever the next open one is, doesn’t matter as long as it’s not one you’ve already used). The Canvas assignment is simply a text box where you should include:

1. The name of the project and/or a brief description of the project
2. A link to the subdirectory for your mini-project
   1. If you completed the project in a separate repository, your assessment.md file in the subdirectory should explain how to access your work.
3. Any additional info you’d like your grader to know

Your grader will access the directory you’ve linked to, review your work, and provide feedback in the assessment.md file. Once the assessment is complete, your grader will push the file back to your repository, and your Canvas assignment submission will be marked “complete.”

Mini-project menu overview

Earn up to 40 points across all mini-projects for meeting course objectives, and an additional 10 for engagement.

These projects do not have strict submission or grading requirements. You can make any mini-project as simple or as complex as you like. If you write a hello_world() function that’s 5 lines long, that’s fine, but you’ll probably only be able to demonstrate a couple of the learning objectives. If you write a hello_world() function that’s 50 lines long, or write multiple functions and build them into your own package, you’ll probably be able to demonstrate a whole lot more than that.

The complexity you aim for can matter for engagement points. That 5-line hello_world() function might not earn any engagement points, while the 50-line one could earn you all 10.

The same goes for the guided exercises, like the leveled data cleaning notebooks. The Level 1 exercises are designed to be relatively simple and straightforward, while the Level 2 exercises are more complex and open-ended, but you can complicate a Level 1 and simplify a Level 2 as much as you like. You’re assessed on demonstrating the objectives and engagement, not on following the directions of the exercise to the letter.

Some projects are marked as “off the syllabus” (OtS). These are opportunities to learn and demonstrate skills that aren’t explicitly covered in the course. These will let you showcase the skills we do explicitly cover in a different context, or let you explore something that interests you.

You are welcome to go “off the menu” (OtM) to design your own mini-project that lets you focus on your interests while still demonstrating the course objectives. If you choose to do this, you should submit a proposal for approval using the otm-proposal.md file in the centralized repo. Instructions for completing and submitting the proposal are in the same document.

Mini-project menu

Tags:

1. (GE): This is a semi-structured guided exercise with a .qmd notebook to guide you through the project. These typically have both a “Level 1” and “Level 2” version, with the latter being more complex and offering less guidance.
2. (DEMO): This is not a mini-project, but a demonstration of the skills you’ll need to complete the related mini-project. There is nothing to complete, and you should not submit these for grading.
3. (OtS): This project is “off-the-syllabus” because it involves skills beyond the learning objectives of the class.
4. (2+): This project is designed for pairs or groups of students to complete together.

Menu:

This menu reflects the current structure of the centralized assessment repository.

1. Data cleaning
   • (GE, DEMO) Walkthrough
   1. (GE) Level 1
   2. (GE) Level 2
   3. (2+) Un-clean some data & swap to clean
2. Data wrangling
   • (GE, DEMO) Walkthrough
   1. (GE) Level 1
   2. (GE) Level 2
   3. (2+) Ravage some poor datasets & swap to wrangle
   4. (OtS) Access, read in, and wrangle nested or non-tabular data (e.g., JSON, XML)
3. Data visualization & presentation
   • (GE, DEMO) Walkthrough
   1. (GE) Level 1
   2. (GE) Level 2
   3. Create a custom ggplot2 theme
   4. (2+) Make plots & swap to recreate
   5. Create beautiful tables with packages like kableExtra, flextable, stargazer , gt, or xtable (there are lots!)
   6. Present the same data in multiple ways (e.g., bar chart, line chart, table)
   7. (OtS) Create a plot with non-ggplot2 packages
4. Data analysis
   1. (GE) Descriptive statistics
   2. (GE) Hypothesis testing
   3. (OtS) Higher-level statistics
5. Data communication
   1. Transpose a paper into Quarto markdown
   2. Write a memo or brief report based on a previous assignment
   3. Create a demo .qmd or .Rmd for one or more class topics
   4. (OtS) Recreate your Quarto report with papaja or RMarkdown
   5. (OtS) Use Quarto to publish something other than a document (e.g., website, presentation, dashboard)
   6. (OtS) Create a shiny app or dashboard
6. R Programming
   • (DEMO) hello_world() examples
   1. Create a hello_world() function
   2. Create a plotting function
   3. Create a wrangling function
   4. Recreate a function from base R or a non-tidyverse package using tidyverse functions
   5. (OtS) Create a package
7. Git & GitHub (these can use real projects or dummy data)
   1. Set up a skeleton repo to create APA quarto manuscripts
   2. (2+) create and maintain a repo as collaborators and use cloning, forking, merging etc
   3. (OtS) Create a GitHub pages website
   4. (OtS) Host a package through a GitHub repo
8. Unassessed Learning Objectives & Miscellaneous
   1. Create and document a style guide and apply it to a script or notebook
   2. Create a debugging journal
   3. Write documentation for a function that you’ve written (e.g., a hello_world() function or something you use in your research project), following the standard documentation guidelines and expectations (i.e., it should match what you see when you use ?somefunction )
   4. In the format of your choosing (bullet points, paragraphs, mindmap, flowchart, slides, etc.), show me how you understand the points listed under “conceptual skills”.
   5. Get obsessed with LaTeX!
   6. Contribute answers to stackoverflow, reddit, etc.
   7. Create a tutorial on a topic of your choosing in the format of your choosing
   8. Fork the schelling-games repo and convert the GitHub pages repo into an apaquarto repo that renders to pdf, or just mess around with a range of skills

FAQ

Visit the FAQ page of the course website for answers to common questions about the mini-projects and other course expectations.

Be sure to read the README of the centralized assessment repository for detailed instructions on how to fork that repo and use it to complete and submit mini-projects throughout the quarter.