donorschoose.org
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The best way of hands-on practice would be to bring your own data of interest, set up some important project questions, design database and analytical schemes for them. Unfortunately, this is not possible - you don't have data, and you might not have interest, yet. In this course, we will use public data from donorschoose.org. This website is a crowdfunding website that is devoted to help fund public schools in the U.S. Unfortunately, this website is not reachable from Mainland China (my guess is that the website is hosted on Google Cloud). However, I will show you some pictures to help you understand what the website looks like.
First of all, you need to understand what 'crowdfunding' is. This is beyond the purpose of our course. Please see this article:
donorschoose.org is a crowdfunding website with a specific purpose, charitable fund-raising. However, there are many different types of crowdfunding websites, very famous examples being Kickstarter and Indiegogo. You can think of this as an 'open-economy based investment' platform. If you have some small money (like 10 yuan) that doesn't make much difference in your life, why not give it to some exciting idea that might change the world? Okay, this is enough for crowdfunding.
This is the search page in donorschoose.org.
Each box represents a projectthat was created by a public school teacher. On the right side of each box, you see how many donors have made donations so far, how much money a project needs to be completed. completion is an important concept in donorschoose.org because if the project is not completed by a given end date, the public school teacher will not get any money. There's an alternative way as well; if donors only gave you 30 yuan until the end of the project, you get only 30 yuan. In this model, there's no completion . Which model is better? This is first thing you might want to decide on to make donorschoose.org successful. This is not an easy question; in fact there's whole lots of mathematical arguments by economists. They call the two model 'contribution game' (no threshold) and 'subscription game' (with threshold). Second thing I want you to note is that I used some 'boxed' words, like project, donors, donations, etc. These are examples of what we will later call 'entity'. Even if you don't remember this from MIS class last semester, Don't worry about it. We will come back to this, by the 'practice-first approach,' after you play around with the data.
Let's do a bit more of tour. This is a page for one of the project.
It seems like this teacher want to teach 3-5 graders (9-12 years old) how to code with computer language with an educational robot toy, called Dash Robot. Here's how it looks like:
https://www.amazon.com/Wonder-Workshop-Robot-Challenge-Bundle/dp/B07CQM68JH
This is expensive! Right? Public schools apparently have that kind of money. So this what teachers ask for:
What you should note here first is that the money info here is not simple. There's 'materials cost,' probably the price of the robot. But, there are so many kinds of other costs you have to consider. A delivery person needs money, state government tax this donation, credit card company needs money for processing the donation, and so on. Every time a donor make a contribution, lots of cost incurred, and they should be recorded somewhere. To complicate the story, state sales tax will differ depending on which state a donor AND/OR the teacher live in (the teacher teaches in California apparently. Look at the upper-right side of the picture). How does donorschoose know this? It will use some locational information, like latitude and altitude -- this should be stored somewhere as well; but probably not in the cost table. There are multi-millions of donations, projects, and teachers. Okay, are you now convinced that Microsoft Excel is not enough to do the job?
Here's another type of data that should be stored. Donors make comments. This is awful because these are not numbers. Non-numbers are bad because (a) they are long, (b) not simple to analyze (you cannot add or multiply words), (c) sometimes different values are 'related' (e.g. some text is a response to another text. See below), etc. This is another reason why we need a bit more than Microsoft Excel.
