Lessons Learned from My First MiniCompetion

Editor’s Note: This post does not contain ANY code but describes concepts for data science which are language agnostic. “We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.” ― John Dewey, American Education Reformer After having dabbled in data science for the past few years, I decided to take the leap and attend an intensive data science bootcamp in Berlin at Data Science Retreat (DSR) from January till April.
Mapping World Languages' Difficulty Relative to English

Mapping World Languages' Difficulty Relative to English

Editor’s Note: This post is best viewed on the original website EducatorsRLearners I was reading r/MapPorn and saw the image below: As fate would have it, the very first comment was from Guridkt who said, “I’d like to see asia too, i wonder if there’s a map of that. (sic)” So would I, so lets do it. About the Data This map is based on data published by the US Foreign Service Institute and, according to their website, it is based on the institutes’ “70 years of experience in teaching languages to U.
Communicating IELTS Averages with Maps - Part II

Communicating IELTS Averages with Maps - Part II

The previous post focused on collecting the data needed to make custom maps. This post will make use of that data to create maps like the one above as well as some others. While it isn’t necessary to read the previous post, it is recommended. Step 1: Load the Libraries and the Data Now, if you want to review, you can follow all the steps in the previous post. If not,you can read in the data by following the steps below.
Communicating IELTS Averages with Maps - Part I

Communicating IELTS Averages with Maps - Part I

Maps are great for visualizing dry data. In this series of posts, I’ll demonstrate how to scrape websites in order to turn this: into this: Today, I want to focus on scraping the requisite data for making the map above. Now I could just highlight the table, and then copy and paste it into a spreadsheet, but for really big tables that are spread over multiple pages, we’re going to want to do something that is more reproducible.
Coloring Under the Lines in ggplot

Coloring Under the Lines in ggplot

I am tasked with explaining incredibly complex things to people who do not have a lot of time. Consequently, using visuals has been a life saver. One day I was visiting a school explaining the Common Eurpoean Framework of Reference for Languages, which, in a nutshell, describes what language learners can do at different levels of proficiency AND the number of hours it takes for them to progress to each level.