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(Guest post by Bartosz Sękiewicz)
We invite you to participate in our Kaggle-style R competition, an online team competition (1-3 people) which is based in Poland though we would welcome international teams. It will take place during July and August 2016. The organisers are Do-IT Solutions Ltd and eRka (Cracow R User Group), who have decided to join forces again after our successful marathon data analysis in Cracow in July 2015.
On the (eRka Website) you will find an interview with Dr Ian Smythe – the main initiator of the competition – to help understand the background and why he thinks it has the potential to impact upon the lives of millions.
Due to the fact that it is a holiday period and the availability of some people may be limited, we decided to split the competition into three stages (awarded separately). For each of the steps, teams will be required to analyse previously unpublished data (most of these data has been collected this year) related to education in South Africa. A specially developed online Shiny app allows participants to familiarize themselves with the data quickly, so you can focus on creative exploration. Access to the app will be possible when the data is made available through GitHub.
The three competitions are:
Gender bias in cognitive tasks (mental rotation) – Open: 8 July, Deadline: 24 July
Scoring maths tests using errors and time – Open: 22 July, Deadline: 7 August
The socio-economic impact on literacy development – Open: 5 August, Deadline: 21 August
The only accepted tool to generate competition results is R. Other tools can be used to clean up the data for example, but this should be clearly marked, and any modifications to the data set need to be submitted with results. (N.B. Due to the method of data collection, the results are already very clean.)
The best teams will be awarded small prizes, to be presented during the ‘ceremony’, which will be held in late August in Krakow. It is likely that the results of the competition will be published in scientific journals.
If you are interested in cooperation outside this competition, either as a private individual or maybe as a lecturer, there are many more data sets, and many more worthy questions seeking creative answers. For further details, please contact Ian Smythe (ian[a]doitprofiler[dot]com).
For more information and contest rules (version English and Polish) can be found at www.doitprofiler.com/rkrakow
