DataFest has emerged as a prominent informal data science education event, offering participants a unique opportunity to engage with real world data challenges. This extracurricular event is less structured than a formal university course, takes place over a weekend in the spring, and develops teamwork and communication skills while engaging students in an open-ended challenge with large, complex, authentic data. The core elements of DataFest are similar across sites but the local context and multifaceted motivations, goals, and expectations of both organizers and participants creates opportunities and challenges statistics educators at each site will benefit from understanding.
This work is part of an Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) project funded by the National Science Foundation. The research team spent two years at six DataFest sites conducting surveys and interviews with organizers and participants to better understand the goals and motivations for hosting and taking part in DataFest.