Data Science for Beginners - A Curriculum

Azure Cloud Advocates at Microsoft are pleased to offer a 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum all about Data Science. Each lesson includes pre-lesson and post-lesson quizzes, written instructions to complete the lesson, a solution, and an assignment. Our project-based pedagogy allows you to learn while building, a proven way for new skills to 'stick'.

Hearty thanks to our authors:

Getting Started

Teachers, we have included some suggestions on how to use this curriculum. We'd love your feedback in our discussion forum!

Students, to use this curriculum on your own, fork the entire repo complete the exercises on your own, starting with a pre-lecture quiz, then reading the lecture completing the rest of the activities. Try to create the projects by comprehending the lessons rather than copying the solution code; however that code is available in the /solutions folders in each project-oriented lesson. Another idea would be to form a study group with friends go through the content together. For further study, we recommend Microsoft Learn by watching the videos mentioned below.

Pedagogy

We have chosen two pedagogical tenets while building this curriculum: ensuring that it is project-based that it includes frequent quizzes. By the end of this series, students will have ...

In addition, a low-stakes quiz before a class sets the intention of the student towards learning a topic, while a second quiz after class ensures further retention. This curriculum was designed to be flexible fun can be taken in whole or in part. The projects start small become increasingly complex by the end of the 12 week cycle.

Find our Code of Conduct, Contributing, Translation guidelines. We welcome your constructive feedback!

Each lesson includes:

• optional sketchnote
• optional supplemental video
• pre-lesson warmup quiz
• written lesson
• for project-based lessons, step-by-step guides on how to build the project
• knowledge checks
• a challenge
• supplemental reading
• assignment
• post-lesson quiz

A note about quizzes: All quizzes are contained in this app, for 48 total quizzes of three questions each. They are linked from within the lessons but the quiz app can be run locally; follow the instruction in the quiz-app folder. They are gradually being localized.

Lessons

Lesson Number	Topic	Lesson Grouping	Learning Objectives	Linked Lesson	Author
01	Defining Data Science	Introduction	TBD
02	Data Science Ethics	Introduction	Data Ethics Concepts, Challenges & Frameworks.		Nitya Narasimhan
03	Defining Data	Introduction	TBD
04	Introduction to Statistics & Probability	Introduction	TBD
05	Working with Spreadsheets	Working With Data	Spreadsheets
06	Working with Relational Databases	Working With Data	Relational Databases
07	Working with NoSQL Data	Working With Data	NoSQL
08	Working with Python	Working With Data	Python Data
09	Cleaning and Transforming Data	Working With Data	Cleaning Transformations
10	Visualizing Quantities	Data Visualization	Learn how to use Matplotlib to visualize bird data 🦆	Quantities	Jen
11	Visualizing Distributions of Data	Data Visualization	Distributions		Jen
12	Visualizing Proportions	Data Visualization	Proportions		Jen
13	Visualizing Relationships	Data Visualization	Relationships		Jen
14	Meaningful Visualizations	Data Visualization	Making meaningful visualizations		Jen
15	The Data Science Lifecycle	Lifecycle	Capturing
16	The Data Science Lifecycle	Lifecycle	Processing
17	The Data Science Lifecycle	Lifecycle	Analyzing
18	The Data Science Lifecycle	Lifecycle	Communication
19	The Data Science Lifecycle	Lifecycle	Maintaining
20	Data Science in the Cloud	Cloud Data	TBD
21	Data Science in the Cloud	Cloud Data	TBD
22	Data Science in the Cloud	Cloud Data	TBD
23	Data Science in the Wild	In the Wild	TBD
24	Data Science in the Wild	In the Wild	TBD

Offline access

You can run this documentation offline by using Docsify. Fork this repo, install Docsify on your local machine, then in the root folder of this repo, type docsify serve. The website will be served on port 3000 on your localhost: localhost:3000.

PDF

A PDF of all of the lessons can be found here