Answers.Body: <p>There are a few Stack Exchange sites you might want to check out:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p><a href="https://opendata.stackexchange.com/">Open Data</a>: Open Data Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for developers and researchers interested in open data.</p></li>
  <li><p><a href="https://datascience.stackexchange.com/">Data Science</a>: Data Science Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Data science professionals, Machine Learning specialists, and those interested in learning more about the field.</p></li>
  <li><p><a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/">Cross Validated</a>: Cross Validated is a question and answer site for people interested in statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, and data visualization.</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>But taking a step back, you might want to teach the meta-lesson of finding data in the real world. There are a ton of APIs and open-source data repos out there, and finding them is a very important skill by itself- plus it give students a way to actually use their skills after the class ends.</p>
  
  <p>So instead of just giving your students a flat file, have them come up with their own. Maybe they use an API from a product they use, like <a href="https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Spotify</a>, or <a href="https://developers.google.com/youtube/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">YouTube</a>. If that's too advanced for the students to do, then maybe you spend a class coming up with the dataset together, with you writing the code and the students talking about what would be interesting to see.</p>
  
  <p>Or just searching for "XYZ datasets" returns a ton of results. Have the students come up with datasets related to stuff they're interested in.</p>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2017-07-31T16:59:54.150Z
Answers.LastActivityDate: 2017-07-31T17:45:54.807Z
Answers.LastEditDate: 2017-07-31T17:45:54.807Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: Kevin Workman
Answers.Body: <p>I'd like to expand on one source in an answer offered above: The <strong>C</strong>ollection <strong>o</strong>f <strong>R</strong>eally <strong>G</strong>reat, <strong>I</strong>nteresting, <strong>S</strong>ituated Datasets, or simply <a href="https://think.cs.vt.edu/corgis/" rel="noreferrer">CORGIS</a>.</p>
  
  <p>From their <a href="https://think.cs.vt.edu/about" rel="noreferrer">About</a> page:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>The <strong>CORGIS project</strong> aims to transform early computer science projects
    by introducing real-world data via simple-to-use client libraries.
    Data Science offers an authentic context for your students to solve
    real-world problems with programming. The CORGIS project has over 40
    libraries for subjects such as politics, education, literature,
    construction, and more!</p>
    
    <p>CORGIS offers full support for Java, Python, and Racket, in addition
    to making its data files available in common data formats like JSON
    and CSV. Some datasets are also available through our unique
    Visualizer platform, which enables data science exploration directly
    within the browser!</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>The topics available for analysis are incredibly wide-ranging (as exemplified in the list above). I plan on showing this to my students next year for the AP CS Principles Create Task. My students are comfortable by that point with Python, so this is right at their ability level and will allow for some interesting, innovating, and original project ideas. The accessibility level is just right a student finishing the first year of a high school level CS course.</p>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
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Answers.LastActivityDate: 2017-07-30T20:56:37.890Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: Peter
Answers.Body: <p>I've been a big fan of Twitter for this type of project since 2014.  You could use an API to pull some news feeds and turn them into a flat file for use with students.  My students have found researching politicians interesting - especially to see if the subjects of their tweets match the issues they claim to care most about.  I use the Twitter 4J API for this.  <a href="http://twitter4j.org/en/" rel="noreferrer">http://twitter4j.org/en/</a></p>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
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Answers.LastEditDate: 2017-07-23T17:37:22.770Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: CS Cheerleader
Answers.Body: <p>I'm going to clean this up later, but am posting the verbatim work of the CSTA members so others can chime in with additional bullets. I'm aiming to have one resource per bullet: Resources name, link, annotation, example ideas for projects</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>How about CSV Data Sets at <a href="https://vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets/datasets.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets/datasets.html</a>
  Maybe there’s something there which would appeal to MS kids. (Joe Kmoch)</p></li>
  <li><p>Look at the Mondial database, supposedly based on the CIA's World Fact Book. (<a href="https://www.dbis.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/Mondial/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.dbis.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/Mondial/</a>) It's in various  formats other than CSV (various relational databases, XML, etc)  but should easily be exported to CSV form ( see <a href="http://www.convertcsv.com/sql-to-csv.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.convertcsv.com/sql-to-csv.htm</a>) . It's got dozens of relations, and is sizable enough so that you really do need to query it via a program to answer questions. (Doug H)</p></li>
  <li><p>There are some links on my BigData webpage ( under #4.) that could be a lot of fun
  <a href="https://sites.google.com/a/pgcps.org/livecode/big-data/bigdata---projects" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://sites.google.com/a/pgcps.org/livecode/big-data/bigdata---projects</a> (Cyril Pruszko PGCPS)</p></li>
  <li><p>I had fun in the past using First Fleet. See firstfleet.uow.edu.au (Andrew Williams and Simon Carter)</p></li>
  <li><p>Titanic passenger lists (Simon Carter)</p></li>
  <li><p><a href="http://ww2.amstat.org/censusatschool/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Census at School</a> asks lots of different questions of hundreds of thousands of U.S. students and has data by grade and state. My students have used the data for linear regression and chi-square tests. (Andrea DePaolo)<p>CensusAtSchool data works well with middle schoolers. I had 7th graders measure their height and armspan and add their own data to the CensusAtSchool's set using a googlesheet. (BB) </p></li>
  <li><p>In the UK, publicly accessible historic weather data is useful and offers some lovely cross curricular links to science, maths and geography: <a href="http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/climate-historic/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/climate-historic/</a> 
  I think something rather more comprehensive in the US is available here: <a href="https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets</a> (Miles Berry)</p></li>
  <li><p><a href="https://www.data.gov/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.data.gov/</a>  (Ty Davis)</p></li>
  <li><p>Wikipedia has some extractable data <a href="https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2016/2/excavating-data-gems-wikipedia-50966" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2016/2/excavating-data-gems-wikipedia-50966</a> 
  (Ken Price in Tasmania)</p></li>
  <li><p>Tuva labs tuvalabs.com (Jon Mannion) is an entire data exploration environment with curriculum and a browser-based interface that allows students to drag various variables from a data set onto axes, akin to SPSS or Fathom.</p></li>
  <li><p><a href="http://stats.oecd.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://stats.oecd.org/</a> has some OECD datasets
  (Ken Price in Tasmania)</p></li>
  <li><p>Google also has a Public Data Directory at <a href="https://www.google.com/publicdata/directory" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.google.com/publicdata/directory</a> and a data exploring tool.
  (Ken Price in Tasmania)</p></li>
  <li><p>What about Bart, A. C., Whitcomb, R., Kafura, D., Shaffer, C. A., &amp; Tilevich, E. (2017, March). Computing with CORGIS: Diverse, Real-world Datasets for Introductory Computing. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (pp. 57-62). ACM.
  CORGIS Datasets Project
  <a href="https://think.cs.vt.edu/corgis/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://think.cs.vt.edu/corgis/</a>  (Francesco Maiorana)</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Here are some additional links from my bookmarks</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>The <a href="http://www.kdd.org/kdd-cup" rel="nofollow noreferrer">KDD Cup</a> is an ~annual competition for the public, aimed at grad students and professionals. Past year's competitions are on the website, usually with the data, and middle schoolers could use the data for easier tasks than the KDD Cup challenge posed. </li>
  <li><a href="https://www.kaggle.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Kaggle</a> is akin to and overlapping the KDD Cup.</li>
  <li>Teenagers like music. <a href="https://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/millionsong/tasteprofile" rel="nofollow noreferrer">The Million Song Data set</a> could be used to compare song length by artist, for example. </li>
  <li><p>An image makes for a nice large data set and motivates students to understand nested loops, conditionals, the accumulator pattern, and the best-so-far pattern. I have students pick their own image and decide upon their own task for data analysis (e.g., range of brightness or number of pixels that meet a color criterion) and manipulation (e.g. change brightish yellows to magenta.)</p></li>
  <li><p><a href="https://concord.org/projects/codap" rel="nofollow noreferrer">CODAP</a>, the Common Online Data Analysis Platform. A project of the Concord Consortium, led by the person who led development of Fathom, a stats software for K-12. </p></li>
  <li><p>I wish there was a women's basketball version of this set of links:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>NFL plays in CSV: <a href="http://archive.advancedfootballanalytics.com/2010/04/play-by-play-data.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://archive.advancedfootballanalytics.com/2010/04/play-by-play-data.html</a></li>
  <li>News article about Big Data in sports, reading across the curriculum: <a href="https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/02/06/big-data-in-big-sports/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/02/06/big-data-in-big-sports/</a></li>
  <li>Programmers' discussion thread about handling football data: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5002974" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5002974</a></li>
  </ul></li>
  <li>The Social Security Administration offers CSV files of <a href="https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/limits.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">name frequencies by birth gender and year</a>. State-level files are also available by gender and year.</li>
  <li>The UC Irvine Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems has the <strong>Motherlode</strong> <a href="http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Machine learning repository of datasets</a>. You can search by domain (e.g. life science), by the data set size, or by the type of task students would typically do with that data.  </li>
  <li><p>GapMinder has raw <a href="http://www.gapminder.org/data/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">data files</a> of World Health Organization data as well as an <a href="/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly=2003;lb=f;il=t;fs=11;al=30;stl=t;st=t;nsl=t;se=t$wst;tts=C$ts;sp=5.59290322580644;ti=2013$zpv;v=0$inc_x;mmid=XCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj1jiMAkmq1iMg;by=ind$inc_y;mmid=YCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj2tPLxKvvnNPA;by=ind$inc_s;uniValue=8.21;iid=phAwcNAVuyj0XOoBL_n5tAQ;by=ind$inc_c;uniValue=255;gid=CATID0;by=grp$map_x;scale=log;dataMin=194;dataMax=96846$map_y;scale=lin;dataMin=23;dataMax=86$map_s;sma=49;smi=2.65$cd;bd=0$inds=;example=75">online tool</a> for exploring the data along with interesting examples. </p></li>
  <li><p><a href="http://exoplanets.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Exoplanets databases</a></p></li>
  <li><p>The Current Population Survey (CPS) asks 60,000 U.S. households each  month about income and employment. You can download <a href="https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/data-detail.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">CPS data tables</a> and can create your own table with the <a href="https://www.census.gov/cps/data/cpstablecreator.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">CPS table creator</a></p></li>
  <li><p>A similar question on <a href="https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-find-large-datasets-open-to-the-public" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Quora</a></p></li>
  <li><p><strong>Earthquakes</strong> From USGS, <a href="https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/</a> allows the user to filter earthquakes by location, date, and magnitude and <a href="https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/search/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">download a CSV</a>. The website has built-in geographic visualization. (Contributed to PLTW CS Principles course by Nathan Nolte)</p></li>
  </ul>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2017-07-03T21:45:43.753Z
Answers.LastActivityDate: 2017-07-30T15:41:39.127Z
Answers.LastEditDate: 2017-07-30T15:41:39.127Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: Bennett Brown
Answers.Body: <p>The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has plenty of climate data sets (<a href="https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets</a>).  I've used them with students to predict how many school days we may miss in February based on historical data.  Recently, I heard that the latest named tropical storm in the Atlantic is a three-letter name so I started wondering about hurricane names.  I might use a hurricane name data set for an assignment this coming school year.  Weather seems to hold my students interest.</p>
  
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Answers.Text: Yes, thanks, fantastic for middle school! Also reminds me of earthquakes. I've noted anecdotally that kids with extreme interest in weather and earthquakes are disproportionately boys. A book about CS at CMU (Kicking Butt in CS) claims that CMU's success in getting gender balance was orthogonqal to such gender difference observations, but it makes me wonder what the result would be of greater engagement with weather measurements for K-2 girls.
Answers.UserDisplayName: Bennett Brown
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Answers.LastActivityDate: 2017-07-23T15:41:53.040Z
Answers.LastEditDate: 2017-07-23T15:41:53.040Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: CS Cheerleader
Body: <p>What are engaging sources of data with which students can explore, develop questions, analyze, and draw conclusions in an intro CS course? I'm looking for flat files like XLSX or CSV, or relational databases in an environment that permits selection and export of a flat file. </p>
  
  <p>Kelly Powers asked (nearly) this question in the <a href="https://listserv.acm.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ACMLPX.CGI?A0=CSTA-MEMBERS" rel="noreferrer">CSTA-members listserv</a> in May 2017 and got 14 answers in a couple of days, which I'll consolidate and extend in an answer here.</p>
  
Tags: <resource-request><databases>
Title: Good datasets for intro CS courses?
ThreadText: # Good datasets for intro CS courses?
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2017-07-03)
  
  What are engaging sources of data with which students can explore, develop questions, analyze, and draw conclusions in an intro CS course? I'm looking for flat files like XLSX or CSV, or relational databases in an environment that permits selection and export of a flat file.
  
  Kelly Powers asked (nearly) this question in the [CSTA-members listserv](https://listserv.acm.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ACMLPX.CGI?A0=CSTA-MEMBERS) in May 2017 and got 14 answers in a couple of days, which I'll consolidate and extend in an answer here.
  
  **Tags:** resource-request, databases
  
  
  ---
  
  ## 5 answers
  
  ### Answer by username_0 on 2017-07-03. Score: 7
  
  I'm going to clean this up later, but am posting the verbatim work of the CSTA members so others can chime in with additional bullets. I'm aiming to have one resource per bullet: Resources name, link, annotation, example ideas for projects
  
  * How about CSV Data Sets at <https://vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets/datasets.html>
    Maybe there’s something there which would appeal to MS kids. (Joe Kmoch)
  * Look at the Mondial database, supposedly based on the CIA's World Fact Book. (<https://www.dbis.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/Mondial/>) It's in various formats other than CSV (various relational databases, XML, etc) but should easily be exported to CSV form ( see <http://www.convertcsv.com/sql-to-csv.htm>) . It's got dozens of relations, and is sizable enough so that you really do need to query it via a program to answer questions. (Doug H)
  * There are some links on my BigData webpage ( under #4.) that could be a lot of fun
    <https://sites.google.com/a/pgcps.org/livecode/big-data/bigdata---projects> (Cyril Pruszko PGCPS)
  * I had fun in the past using First Fleet. See firstfleet.uow.edu.au (Andrew Williams and Simon Carter)
  * Titanic passenger lists (Simon Carter)
  * [Census at School](http://ww2.amstat.org/censusatschool/) asks lots of different questions of hundreds of thousands of U.S. students and has data by grade and state. My students have used the data for linear regression and chi-square tests. (Andrea DePaolo)
  
    CensusAtSchool data works well with middle schoolers. I had 7th graders measure their height and armspan and add their own data to the CensusAtSchool's set using a googlesheet. (BB)
  * In the UK, publicly accessible historic weather data is useful and offers some lovely cross curricular links to science, maths and geography: <http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/climate-historic/>
    I think something rather more comprehensive in the US is available here: <https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets> (Miles Berry)
  * <https://www.data.gov/> (Ty Davis)
  * Wikipedia has some extractable data <https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2016/2/excavating-data-gems-wikipedia-50966>
    (Ken Price in Tasmania)
  * Tuva labs tuvalabs.com (Jon Mannion) is an entire data exploration environment with curriculum and a browser-based interface that allows students to drag various variables from a data set onto axes, akin to SPSS or Fathom.
  * <http://stats.oecd.org/> has some OECD datasets
    (Ken Price in Tasmania)
  * Google also has a Public Data Directory at <https://www.google.com/publicdata/directory> and a data exploring tool.
    (Ken Price in Tasmania)
  * What about Bart, A. C., Whitcomb, R., Kafura, D., Shaffer, C. A., & Tilevich, E. (2017, March). Computing with CORGIS: Diverse, Real-world Datasets for Introductory Computing. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (pp. 57-62). ACM.
    CORGIS Datasets Project
    <https://think.cs.vt.edu/corgis/> (Francesco Maiorana)
  
  Here are some additional links from my bookmarks
  
  * The [KDD Cup](http://www.kdd.org/kdd-cup) is an ~annual competition for the public, aimed at grad students and professionals. Past year's competitions are on the website, usually with the data, and middle schoolers could use the data for easier tasks than the KDD Cup challenge posed.
  * [Kaggle](https://www.kaggle.com/) is akin to and overlapping the KDD Cup.
  * Teenagers like music. [The Million Song Data set](https://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/millionsong/tasteprofile) could be used to compare song length by artist, for example.
  * An image makes for a nice large data set and motivates students to understand nested loops, conditionals, the accumulator pattern, and the best-so-far pattern. I have students pick their own image and decide upon their own task for data analysis (e.g., range of brightness or number of pixels that meet a color criterion) and manipulation (e.g. change brightish yellows to magenta.)
  * [CODAP](https://concord.org/projects/codap), the Common Online Data Analysis Platform. A project of the Concord Consortium, led by the person who led development of Fathom, a stats software for K-12.
  * I wish there was a women's basketball version of this set of links:
  
    + NFL plays in CSV: <http://archive.advancedfootballanalytics.com/2010/04/play-by-play-data.html>
    + News article about Big Data in sports, reading across the curriculum: <https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/02/06/big-data-in-big-sports/>
    + Programmers' discussion thread about handling football data: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5002974>
  * The Social Security Administration offers CSV files of [name frequencies by birth gender and year](https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/limits.html). State-level files are also available by gender and year.
  * The UC Irvine Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems has the **Motherlode** [Machine learning repository of datasets](http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/). You can search by domain (e.g. life science), by the data set size, or by the type of task students would typically do with that data.
  * GapMinder has raw [data files](http://www.gapminder.org/data/) of World Health Organization data as well as an [online tool](/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly=2003;lb=f;il=t;fs=11;al=30;stl=t;st=t;nsl=t;se=t$wst;tts=C$ts;sp=5.59290322580644;ti=2013$zpv;v=0$inc_x;mmid=XCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj1jiMAkmq1iMg;by=ind$inc_y;mmid=YCOORDS;iid=phAwcNAVuyj2tPLxKvvnNPA;by=ind$inc_s;uniValue=8.21;iid=phAwcNAVuyj0XOoBL_n5tAQ;by=ind$inc_c;uniValue=255;gid=CATID0;by=grp$map_x;scale=log;dataMin=194;dataMax=96846$map_y;scale=lin;dataMin=23;dataMax=86$map_s;sma=49;smi=2.65$cd;bd=0$inds=;example=75) for exploring the data along with interesting examples.
  * [Exoplanets databases](http://exoplanets.org/)
  * The Current Population Survey (CPS) asks 60,000 U.S. households each month about income and employment. You can download [CPS data tables](https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/data-detail.html) and can create your own table with the [CPS table creator](https://www.census.gov/cps/data/cpstablecreator.html)
  * A similar question on [Quora](https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-find-large-datasets-open-to-the-public)
  * **Earthquakes** From USGS, <https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/> allows the user to filter earthquakes by location, date, and magnitude and [download a CSV](https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/search/). The website has built-in geographic visualization. (Contributed to PLTW CS Principles course by Nathan Nolte)
  
  
  ---
  
  ### Answer by username_2 on 2017-07-30. Score: 5
  
  I'd like to expand on one source in an answer offered above: The **C**ollection **o**f **R**eally **G**reat, **I**nteresting, **S**ituated Datasets, or simply [CORGIS](https://think.cs.vt.edu/corgis/).
  
  From their [About](https://think.cs.vt.edu/about) page:
  
  > The **CORGIS project** aims to transform early computer science projects
  > by introducing real-world data via simple-to-use client libraries.
  > Data Science offers an authentic context for your students to solve
  > real-world problems with programming. The CORGIS project has over 40
  > libraries for subjects such as politics, education, literature,
  > construction, and more!
  >
  > CORGIS offers full support for Java, Python, and Racket, in addition
  > to making its data files available in common data formats like JSON
  > and CSV. Some datasets are also available through our unique
  > Visualizer platform, which enables data science exploration directly
  > within the browser!
  
  The topics available for analysis are incredibly wide-ranging (as exemplified in the list above). I plan on showing this to my students next year for the AP CS Principles Create Task. My students are comfortable by that point with Python, so this is right at their ability level and will allow for some interesting, innovating, and original project ideas. The accessibility level is just right a student finishing the first year of a high school level CS course.
  
  
  ---
  
  ### Answer by username_3 on 2017-07-23. Score: 5
  
  I've been a big fan of Twitter for this type of project since 2014. You could use an API to pull some news feeds and turn them into a flat file for use with students. My students have found researching politicians interesting - especially to see if the subjects of their tweets match the issues they claim to care most about. I use the Twitter 4J API for this. <http://twitter4j.org/en/>
  
  
  ---
  
  ### Answer by username_3 on 2017-07-23. Score: 4
  
  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has plenty of climate data sets (<https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets>). I've used them with students to predict how many school days we may miss in February based on historical data. Recently, I heard that the latest named tropical storm in the Atlantic is a three-letter name so I started wondering about hurricane names. I might use a hurricane name data set for an assignment this coming school year. Weather seems to hold my students interest.
  
  > **Comments:**
  > **username_0**: Yes, thanks, fantastic for middle school! Also reminds me of earthquakes. I've noted anecdotally that kids with extreme interest in weather and earthquakes are disproportionately boys. A book about CS at CMU (Kicking Butt in CS) claims that CMU's success in getting gender balance was orthogonqal to such gender difference observations, but it makes me wonder what the result would be of greater engagement with weather measurements for K-2 girls.  
  
  ---
  
  ### Answer by username_1 on 2017-07-31. Score: 2
  
  There are a few Stack Exchange sites you might want to check out:
  
  * [Open Data](https://opendata.stackexchange.com/): Open Data Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for developers and researchers interested in open data.
  * [Data Science](https://datascience.stackexchange.com/): Data Science Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Data science professionals, Machine Learning specialists, and those interested in learning more about the field.
  * [Cross Validated](https://stats.stackexchange.com/): Cross Validated is a question and answer site for people interested in statistics, machine learning, data analysis, data mining, and data visualization.
  
  But taking a step back, you might want to teach the meta-lesson of finding data in the real world. There are a ton of APIs and open-source data repos out there, and finding them is a very important skill by itself- plus it give students a way to actually use their skills after the class ends.
  
  So instead of just giving your students a flat file, have them come up with their own. Maybe they use an API from a product they use, like [Twitter](https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public), [Spotify](https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/), or [YouTube](https://developers.google.com/youtube/). If that's too advanced for the students to do, then maybe you spend a class coming up with the dataset together, with you writing the code and the students talking about what would be interesting to see.
  
  Or just searching for "XYZ datasets" returns a ton of results. Have the students come up with datasets related to stuff they're interested in.
  
  
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