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DataLab project Guides: Best Practices
DataLab project Guides: Best Practices
George Boorman avatar
Written by George Boorman
Updated yesterday

The purpose of guides is to give an overview of the approach a learner could take to complete the project. It should also detail information and hints at a step-by-step level. As a rule of thumb, we recommend having one step for each major task that learners are required to perform in order to complete the project.

There are several sections to Guides, specifically:

  • Item: The title of the step

    • e.g., Identifying the area with the most night crime

  • Body (Item): short summary of the step

    • e.g., You'll need to filter the data for the relevant hours and count the number of crimes by area

  • Hints: Detail about how to complete the step

    • e.g., Counting crime by area

  • Body (Hints): Explicit guidance on how to complete the step:

    • e.g., To count crime by area you need to .groupby() "AREA NAME", then count the number of crime occurrences per hour.

    • e.g., If you sort these results in descending order by using the .sort_values() method with ascending=False you can then isolate the first row and extract the value in the "AREA NAME" column.

The aim is that if learners need a little help they can look at the Item, but if they require more support they can expand to look at the Hints where they'll receive explicit guidance on the methods, functions, and syntax they need to use.

Note that each hint should be written in a way that learners are not required to access another hint in order to understand the information being provided. As an example, if a hint has learners created a variable called grouped_df, then a hint in another section should not explicitly refer to this variable.

For an example of a Guide, please see the image below.

To view the full Guide you can visit this project.

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