DataFest, a celebration of data that began at the University of California at Los Angeles in 2011, includes 60 sites involving 120 institutions from across the globe. It is a 48-hour-long co-curricular event in which teams of undergraduates come together every spring to tackle an authentic data problem. Corporate and civic sponsors donate data sets to DataFest for students to work on. Data sets can be situated in any authentic context ranging from the play of a national sports team, to online textbook use, to pro-bono legal advice services.

The authors first became involved with DataFest through researcher Jennifer Noll and her colleague from TERC, Andee Rubin, who started initial pilot work with Rob Gould in 2019 and 2020. In 2020, they conducted recorded observations of two teams at three points over the 48 hours to better understand the ways teams worked together from start to finish. Building on that pilot work, they ran a three-year, NSF-funded study that took place at six DataFest sites with almost 1,000 students. Their research explored why students take part in DataFest and how teams worked together to navigate the data investigation process within this open-ended context with large, authentic, complex data.