I taught a course entitled Dynamic Data Visualization at the University of North Carolina Asheville last spring. The course was mostly (though, not quite exclusively) hosted here on Observable and presented as a series of notebooks that we worked on together in class. The great folks in Observable’s Education team set us up with a free, pro-level team allowing the students to work in private. I’ve just recently made all the notebooks that form the lesson plans public. Those notebooks are organized and linked from our main class page:
There were almost 20 students in the class, all of whom were computer science majors. A class in data structures was a prerequisite so all students had taken a few computer science classes and had programmed a bit, though not necessarily in Javascript.
The focus was largely on D3 (as opposed to Plot) and covered
- The basics of drawing with SVG
- Interactivity
- Data based plots (like bar charts, histograms, and scatter plots)
- Data wrangling
- Network structures
- Maps
- Moving work off of Observable
The presentation is really meant to be fundamental, even to the point of discussing foundational ideas ahead of code. For example, there’s some discussion about basic statistics - modelling data with distributions and linear regression. There’s also presentation on map projections and another on sports analytics.
My intention is to license these all ISC so feel free to use and adapt.