Inspiration
Teachers have always been thrown into a loop when it comes to their jobs. However, through the pandemic, teachers have faced a new set of challenges. We decided to do a deep dive on the system before the pandemic arised, and find the flaws within the NYC School System that has led educators into the series of obstacles they face in their careers.
What it does
Our project is a series of data visualizations on New York City Public Schools, including both Traditional Public Schools and Charter Schools. Our data visualizations are kept in a Jupyter notebook, which allows for easy set up and viewing. Additionally, our visualizations are interactive because they were built using Plotly, a python data visualization library.
How we built it
We built our data visualizations using a variety of tools. First, we cleaned our data a little using Microsoft Excel. Then, we brought our data into Google Colab/Jupyter Notebooks where we wrote code to visualize our cleaned data in Python, using Plotly and Pandas. Our code and datasets are stored on Github.
Challenges we ran into
One challenge we faced was having opposite experience in parts of our tech set. One of us was skilled in Excel while the other was more equipped with skills in Python. We overcame this challenge by complementing each other’s skills and filling in knowledge gaps where necessary. Additionally, we ran into the challenge of trying to get the bar graphs to line up next to each other. We overcame this challenge by reading through Plotly documentation and answers to similar questions on Stack Overflow.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of cleaning and visualizing so much data in such a short amount of time. We both had other commitments throughout the weekend, so we are excited by how much we were able to accomplish. Additionally, we are proud of improving our data analysis skills using Python, Pandas, and Plotly.
What we learned
We learned more about data visualization, specifically determining which graph fit our visualization goals the best. We did this by thinking critically about what we wanted to represent and going through a series of trial and error. Additionally, we learned a lot about using Python for data visualization, specifically within the Plotly library.
What's next for NYC Teachers
We were able to gain insight on what the system looked like for teachers pre-pandemic. Next, we are interested in looking at data from both during shutdown and after schools finally opened up. Additionally, it would be nice to feature data from the students as they are directly affected by the ways of the NYC school system.
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