Required Background

Web Design: HTML, CSS

Recommended Background

Some Javascript experience

They Come in Knowing....

The Javascript Part : "interaction."

What is the teaching goal?

NYT-Level

Custom Work

Clickable

images

1

10

Use a chart

library

3

Photoshop,

Illustrator

Highcharts

D3.js

Custom

code

5

D3.js, WebGL,

Canvas...

"Custom" Code

d3.selectAll("rect")

  .attr("fill", function(d) {

      if (d.name == "United States") {

         return "red";

       } else {

         return "black";

       }

   });

Portfolio Material

Using github and bl.ocks.org viewer for homework 

Student Projects

Louise Whitaker

Halina Mader

Luis Melgar

Most successful: Factors External to my control

• Had some programming experience previously
• Had good design chops (visual, especially)
• Chased a data story well: Expertise in data exploration, tools
• Did extra work -- external data, used libraries or tools, tried new things
• Had enough time to spend on doing it well

The best students....

Teaching Challenges

• Debugging student problems ALL THE TIME
  •  Doesn't scale!
  • There are no qualified TAs, really.
  • Email debugging is really hard/time consuming
• Homeworks: Time-consuming to grade, but you need to give a lot.  (Every week, usually multiple.)
• Time for projects vs. course content: Ideally, could have been 2 semesters (basics, then a project semester)
• Data mining / analysis: Not in the course, but a critical skill pre-visualization.

Unexpected Pluses

• Very, very motivated students
• Lots of women students in a programming class
• Insufficient web dev classes at the university -- we can fill in the gaps
• Non-journalism students are now interested in visual data journalism (MFA students this semester)
• This skill translates to a lot of jobs, not just newsrooms

"Teaching a Semester of D3.js"

Blog post Went to #1 on Hacker News (Freakishly?)

And it's now being translated for a Chinese data journalism site...

The Materials (on Github)