video/graphic ideas for teaching pandas

[Aidan Feldman]

Hey all-

I teach a Python for Public Policy course which introduces students with zero programming experience to Python and pandas for data analysis. Because COVID is forcing the class to be online (again) for the fall, the department is making a team available that can produce educational content, particularly video and graphics.

There's no shortage of "learn pandas" videos out there, so I was thinking producing some animations (possibly with audio, possibly just as GIFs) for explaining pandas concepts to beginners would be interesting. I was impressed with how well the visuals on the reshaping and pivot tables page were able to convey that transformation through a diagram; wondering what would be possible with motion. Some ideas of what could be animated:

• The existing reshaping graphics, since there's so much there to work with already
  
• How boolean indexing works, as my students were pretty confused by this
• How to create derived columns
• How arithmetic/comparison/logical operations on columns work like those on singular values
• How join/merge/concat work
• How to work with multiindexes
• How to use groupby and the aggregation methods

Do any of those resonate with you as being something particularly hard to explain with words or still images? Any other ideas? Also, if you know of anything I should look at for inspiration, would love to hear it.

Thanks!

Aidan Feldman

Adjunct Instructor

NYU Wager Graduate School of Public Service

P.S. I will try to make the material publicly available and freely licensed, if not contributing it to the pandas site.