#4: United States Congress

MicroProject collectable card

MicroProject Overview

The @unitedstates GitHub organization described itself as a "shared commons of data and tools for the United States. Made by the public, used by the public." Their most popular work is the congress-legislators collection of data, which contains every member "of the United States Congress (1789-Present), congressional committees (1973-Present), committee membership (current only), and presidents and vice presidents of the United States in YAML, JSON, and CSV format."

The dataset of currently serving Members of Congress, known as the legislators-current dataset, and we'll explore that dataset, specifically looking at the birthdays of members of Congress, across both the Senate and House of Representatives.

In this MicroProject, you'll both explore working with the date/time "data type" or "dtype" in pandas and create several exploratory data visualizations! Let's nerd out! 🎉

Video Walkthrough

MicroProjects with Michelle #04: United States Congress

MicroProject Preview

MicroProject Introduction, in Visual Studio Code
MicroProject Introduction, in Visual Studio Code
MicroProject Part #1: The `congress-legislators` dataset
MicroProject Part #1: The `congress-legislators` dataset
MicroProject Part #2.4: An exploratory data visualization of congressional birthdays
MicroProject Part #2.4: An exploratory data visualization of congressional birthdays
MicroProject Part #3.3: A box plot of the distribution of the current age of Congress
MicroProject Part #3.3: A box plot of the distribution of the current age of Congress

First Time Doing a MicroProject?

Each MicroProject starts with a notebook that we provide to you to get started! You will need to configure a git repository to connect to our `microprojects` remote where we release the starter notebook.

Fetch the Initial Files

In your terminal, navigate to your GitHub repository and merge the initial files by running the following commands:

git fetch microprojects
git merge microprojects/microproject-04-us-congress --allow-unrelated-histories -m "Merging initial files"

Complete the Notebook

If the commands above were successful, you have merged in the initial files to start on the MicroProject.

  • Find the new microproject-04-us-congress folder.
  • Open microproject-04-us-congress.ipynb and complete the MicroProject!

Commit and Grade Your Notebook

Once you have finished your notebook, you must use the built-in GitHub Action to preform automated grading of your MicroProject notebook! You will need to commit your work and then manually run the GitHub Action.

Commit Your Work

To commit your notebook, run the standard git commands in your terminal:

git add -u
git commit -m "microproject completed"
git push

Grade Your Notebook

To grade your notebook, you will need to visit your GitHub repository in your browser.

  • Visit your GitHub repository in your browser
  • Click on the "Actions" tab
  • Under "Workflows", find the workflow for this microproject
  • Click the "Run Workflow" in the blue box, and then the green "Run Workflow"
  • After about 10 seconds, you should see a new job that has started running
    • You can click on the job to watch it run in real-time
    • It will take ~1 minute to run and grade
  • Once the running is complete, the autograding summary will be available!