This Data Science Practice Story is here for you; to accompany you through your Data Science learning journey. It will give you the opportunity to practice, apply, and deepen what you've learnt in the online course materials. Additionally, it will help you spot gaps in your understanding, so you can revisit old materials/notes again or use the power of google search to find the answer and close your understanding gaps.
We will announce in our Slack Data Science channel when the respective parts of the practice story are available to you.
Additionally, after approximately a week after we made one part available to you, we will close that particular practice part. So keep in mind to do the practice in time.
Have fun learning.
This is your Data Scientist story. You will jump into the role of a Data Scientist and help out a bike-sharing start-up.
A Münster-based startup called LeezenShare is a bike sharing startup with five stores distributed around the city. Their bike sharing service is on the rise but recently they faced a wave of complaints from customers and employees.
Most of the customers have two issues. First, they are reporting the stores at Hafen Street and König Place don't have enough available bikes on the spot. Second, at store Weseler Street, where a lot of bikes are available they have to wait a very long time before an employee can help them. Employees on the other hand feel overwhelmed with the work at store Weseler Street and are very stressed because of the huge number of customers in the stores.
So the startup LeezenShare approached you - the data scientist - for help. They want to improve their customer and employee experience at their stores by making better decisions on how to distribute bikes across the stores. They want a forecasting system from you so that they know when and where bikes are needed. For the start, they gave you only the data from one store. You have to prove to them that you can build a forecasting system and help them at that one store.
Challenge accepted.
<aside> 💡 The purpose of this practice is that you apply what you have learnt. Since the first few weeks are about learning Python, the idea of this challenge is for you to practice some Python skills.
</aside>
Now after you got a bit familiar with the problem at hand and know what the bike-sharing start-up wants, you want to dive into the work. But as it is always, you know times will come where you will start procrastinating and not focusing on the work. We are all human and procrastination can be a big problem.
So you did some research on how you might fight procrastination. After a while, you came across the Pomodoro method and the Pomodoro timer (check out this link to learn more about this method).
As your first task, you set your goal to build your own Pomodoro timer. Write a script pomodoro.py which you can call in the terminal (Mac) or cmd (Windows), which starts and stops a timer.