Created by: Michael Nadeau and Elinai Alicia Severiano Perez
For our final project in the intermediate data science course, a classmate and I focused on the question, What does a classroom look like in Minnesota?
We did a lot of web scrapping, data-visualizations, and collaboration to make this project come together. Our website features interactive elements, allowing users to explore the educational differences across counties.
Since this project was developed using Quarto, I am unable to share the complete website, unlike my previous project. However, I have included some key components of my project below, though without the website element (the User experience & interactive tabs). I will also provide a link below to my GitHub repository, where the original project is stored.
Diversity and Population
Purpose:
We want to explore learning environments for students in the state of Minnesota. We consider learning environments and schools to be beyond the common public, charter, and private schools, but also online schooling and learning centers. Our site is separated into three sections. The first is what a classroom in general looks like from diversity to quantity of schools in a county. Our second section is looking into the news and what is being discussed. Our third section is looking into funding in schools. We hope that parents looking into different schools can use this as a guide of where their children should go to school, but also for school administrators to see where they could focus their power in their community.
This sections allows one to explore basic parts of classrooms, such as diversity and grade ranges. Change the county with the dropdown box to explore different demographics in a different county.
Data Sources: Census & Minnesota Department of Education
The State of Minnesota Map shows the number of schools per county and estimated overall population per school. We qualify a school to either be private, public, and charter, as well as online school Pre-K centers and such.
The following four graphs display results for Hennepin County, which is part of the Twin Cities. These graphs were designed to be interactive, however it is not possible in Quarto. In the Shiny app, users can select different counties to compare and contrast according to their preferences.
Grade Ranges The numbers symbolize grade | Ex: 1 = 1st grade & EC = Early Childhood
The race divesity is specfic for the community/county overall population, not specific to students
We thought beyond public and private, as we note charter and online school exist
Magnent is defined by the U.S dep of Education as a public elementary school, public secondary school, public elementary education center, or public secondary education center that offers a special curriculum capable of attracting substantial numbers of students of different racial backgrounds
Student and Teachers in the News
Explanation:
For this section of our website, we decided to look into three different news organizations (Fox News, Minnesota Public Radio, and New York Times) and explore the articles associated with Teachers Minnesota and Students Minnesota. We hope this will give us insights into what is needed and being advocated for. Thus our question throughout this section in terms of teachers and students in Minnesota, what is being continuously asked for in the media? Click on the Ternary graphs to explore what words are used most by different news organizations
The articles reviewed for this section have no time range, so included in the data is articles from back then like 1980 to as of right now (Dec 2023)
Data sources: New York Times API, Fox 9, and Minnesota Public Radio
Funding and Impacts
Purpose:
In this aspect of our project we wanted to look at the spending of each school district and factors that may affect it.
Data Sources: Office of Elementary & Secondary Education and WalletHub
A look at the comparison of spending per student with the average income of a given school district. We can see that lower income school districts do a good job of providing more help and money for students who may need a bit more help.
This graph looks at how much each school type spends per student. The “Other” category consists of special education programs, learning centers for disabled children, after school programs, and other specialized academies or programs.
