Data Science MicroProjects

MicroProjects are detailed but small projects designed to do real Data Science in under an hour!

#1: Trends in High School GPAs

Explore the high school GPAs of the incoming freshman classes of Big Ten schools while using row section with DataFrames and creating line charts.

Dataset: Common Data Set, CSV
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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#2: NWS Hourly Weather Forecast

Find the hourly weather forecast for any location in the United States while learning to use a JSON web API to fetch data into a DataFrame for analysis, and to create a scatter plot of your weather forecast.

Dataset: National Weather Service (NWS), JSON API
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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#3: Highest Mountains in the World

Transform data found in Wikipedia articles into DataFrames, combine multiple DataFrames together using concatenation, a build a bar chart from a DataFrame.

Dataset: Wikipedia URL, HTML tables
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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#4: United States Congress

Learn the international standard representation of dates and times (ISO 8601) by exploring the birthdays of every member of Congress, creating both a scatter plot and box plot along the way!

Dataset: @unitedstates GitHub, CSV
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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#5: Bechdel Test

Learn to create a DataFrame pivot table from a collection of over 10,000 films with Bechdel Test ratings, creating a stacked area chart to see how the representation of women in a film has changed over time.

Dataset: BechdelTest.com, JSON API
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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#6: Infinite Money in Roulette (Martingale Betting System)

Motivated by the claims of an "infintie money glitch", create a simulation of the game of Roulette and play out 1,000,000 games to find if it really works by visualizing the results using several line charts!

Dataset: Your own simulation in Python
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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#7: Choropleth Maps

Geographical data visualizations are some of the most impactful forms of data visualization, learn to use example code from the folium project to create a custom choropleth maps from our own CSV data!

Dataset: UIUC Enrollment by Home State, CSV
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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#8: FIFA Matches since 1872

Learn to summarize datasets with panda's powerful groupby function to analyze over 45,000 FIFA matches, creating both a stacked bar chart and mutli-line line graphs.

Dataset: Mart Jürisoo (@martj42) Repository of FIFA Matches
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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#9: Image Steganography with DataFrames

Represent image pixel data in a DataFrame and follow a small treasure hunt by finding hidden images in data by decoding the hidden data we've left for you!

Dataset: Image Files w/ Hidden Data
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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#10: Chess and The Elo System

Explore over a hundred thousand real chess matches played on lichess.org to understand the Elo system used to rank players, and understand how to adapt simulation code to deterministic events.

Dataset: lichess.org open database, CSV
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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#11: United Nations (UNHCR) Refugee Data

Work with a web-based API from the United Nations.

Dataset: United Nations (UNHCR) Web API
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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#12: AI vs Human: Response Analysis

Compare human and AI responses to the same questions and find if there are statistically significant differences between a human and AI response using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.

Dataset: Hugging Face HC3 Dataset
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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#13: Building a Scene Recognition Model from Video Frames

Create your very own AI classifier using images captured from a Data Science DISCOVERY office hours video!

Dataset: Video Frames from DISCOVERY
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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MicroProject #14: Learning Handwritten Digits with AI

Using the most famous dataset in machine learning, apply both K-Means Clustering and K-Nearest Neighbor to find the best algorithm to train an AI model to learn to recognize handwritten digits.

Dataset: Images of Handwritten Digits (MNIST)
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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MicroProjects from the Vault

Nerd out with our previous MicroProjects, using older datasets or not meeting our current standards, to explore more datasets and data science skills!

Vault #1: World University Rankings

From the DISCOVERY Vault: Practice basic data science with pandas while explore the top universities in the world with the dataset from Times Higher Education (THE).

Dataset: Times Higher Education Rankings, CSV
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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Vault #3: Exploring COVID-19 Data from GitHub

From the DISCOVERY Vault: Explore data directly from GitHub that was updated daily by Johns Hopkins University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) every day as they monitored the spread of COVID-19.

Dataset: Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Data, CSV
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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Vault #2: Illini Football Since 1892

From the DISCOVERY Vault: Nerd out with a live dataset of every Illini football game ever played, dating all the way back to 1892, and discover trends in over 130 years of data!

Dataset: Illini Football Dataset, CSV
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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Vault #4: Simulation for Ten Heads in a Row

From the DISCOVERY Vault: Explore working with time series data by finding trends of sequential patterns of data through a simple simulation of flipping a fair coin! Can you get ten heads in a row?

Dataset: Python Simulation with DataFrames
Completed: Many unique users in 2025

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