DS 100 - Introduction to Data Science

Credits: 3

Open to students from any class year or academic discipline. No coding experience is required. Prerequisite: instructor consent. A pilot online course taught by the Liberal Arts Collaborative (LACOL) consortium, including W&L faculty. Prerequisite or corequisite: MATH 101 or equivalent. Open to students from any class year or academic discipline. No coding experience is required. An introduction to the methods of data science, including visualization, manipulation, programming, and modeling. Data plays a central and important role in scholarship, in research, and in modern society. Data science is a collection of analytical and computational methods to enable insight, understanding, and predictions to be drawn from data. Students gain inspiration and confidence to apply the tools and methods of data science in numerous ways, by exposure to theory and application of data science tools and methods that are useful for studying problems in the social sciences, environmental science, psychology, medicine, ecology, chemistry, physics, and other disciplines. This course is taught fully online through both real-time (synchronous) and asynchronous delivery with faculty of Bryn Mawr College, Davidson College, Vassar College, Swarthmore College, Washington and Lee University, and Williams College.