The dessert-first approach to teaching data science | Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel | Data Science Hangout

ADD THE DATA SCIENCE HANGOUT TO YOUR CALENDAR HERE: https://pos.it/dsh - All are welcome! We'd love to see you! We were recently joined by Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, Professor of the Practice at Duke University and Senior Developer Advocate at Posit PBC, to chat about her cake-first teaching philosophy, strategies for communicating technical results to non-technical stakeholders, and career advice on learning new tools later in life, among other things. In this Hangout, we explore Mine's unique approach to explaining difficult topics to students. She describes her method as "let them eat cake first," where she shows learners the final, compelling result (like a visualization) before teaching them the "ingredients" or technical steps required to get there. By establishing the motivation and the destination first, she finds students are more willing to invest the effort into learning the necessary coding and data cleaning logic. Resources mentioned in the video and zoom chat: 🔗 Mine's Coursera 4-course series: Data Science with R Specialization → https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-science-r 🔗 TidyTuesday (Weekly Data Project) → https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday, 🔗 The Test Set Podcast → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-test-set-by-posit/id1823736938 If you didn’t join live, one great discussion you missed from the chat was about the transition from Excel to coding languages like R and Python. Attendees agreed that Excel often acts as a "gateway drug" to data science, shared war stories about managing massive VLOOKUPs (laugh/cry emojis for everyone), and debated the undeniable and lingering utility of spreadsheets for communicating with business stakeholders. Spreadsheets will never go away and many of us are totally ok with that because we still use them every day! Let us know below if you’d like to hear more about this topic 👀 ► Subscribe to Our Channel Here: https://bit.ly/2TzgcOu Follow Us Here: Website: https://www.posit.co Hangout: https://pos.it/dsh The Lab: https://pos.it/dslab LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/posit-software Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/posit.co Thanks for hanging out with us! 💛 Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 04:42 "Why R initially and why still R?" 10:30 "How do you balance it all?" 15:28 "How do you stay up to date on newer techniques?" 20:13 "What is your approach for explaining difficult topics to students?" 25:58 "How do you identify appropriate datasets for beginners?" 32:21 "How frustrating is it when you see statistics being used in a misleading way?" 38:26 "How to communicate with people from different fields?" 44:23 Career advice 48:28 "Have you ever convinced an organization to abandon Excel?" 49:25 "How is statistics viewed these days in the context of things like AI and ML?" 52:38 "Was there a tipping point where you felt experienced enough to give keynotes?"