The fall semester is over. Time to kick back and relax with… data analysis puzzles? Yes, of course!
The creators of the VisiData software have put together a “Hanukkah of Data,” 8 short puzzles released one day at a time. Four have been released already, but there’s still time for you to join in. From their announcement:
If you like the concept of Advent of Code, but wish there was set of data puzzles for data nerds, well, this year you’re in luck!
We’ve been hard at work the past couple of months creating Hanukkah of Data, a holiday puzzle hunt, with 8 days of bite-sized data puzzles. Starting December 18th, we’ll be releasing one puzzle a day, over the 8 days of Hanukkah.
This is your chance to explore a fictional dataset with SQL or VisiData or Datasette or your favorite data analysis tool, to help Aunt Sarah find the family holiday tapestry before her father notices it’s missing!
Register here to receive notifications when puzzles become available.
I can’t remember where I heard about this, but I’m very glad I did. I wasn’t familiar with VisiData before this, but I look forward to giving it a try too. For now, I’m just using R and enjoying myself tremendously. The puzzles are just the right length for my end-of-semester brain, the story is sweet, and the ASCII artwork is gorgeous. Many thanks to Saul Pwanson and colleagues for putting this together.
Are there other efforts like this in the Statistics and/or R communities? Hanukkah of Data is the kind of thing I would love to assign my students to help them practice their data science skills in R. Here are closest other things I’ve seen, though none are quite the same: