Workshop Materials

We are actively developing data science workshops, which are meant to supplement the MEDS curriculum and teach additional skills. Below are our most up-to-date materials, presented to our current cohort of students. Materials for all workshops, including those that are no longer taught/maintained, can be found on the UCSB-MEDS GitHub Organization.


January 26 & February 02, 2024

Star EDS 430: Intro to Shiny

Window Maximize course website | School course catalog

Instructor: Sam Csik

In this workshop, students will learn how to build and deploy Shiny applications. The {shiny} package provides a framework that allows R users to build interactive web applications and dashboards, and has become a popular tool for sharing data analyses and data-derived outputs with broad audiences. In this two-part short course, students will learn the fundamentals of reactivity, how to customize an application user interface (UI), best practices and workflows for developing shiny apps, how to deploy their apps online via RStudio’s hosting service, shinyapps.io, and more.


November 13, 2023

Comments Intro to Inclusive Science Communication

Tv slides

Instructor: Jessica Tran

Studying environmental data science is one thing, but communicating your work to broad audiences can be a challenge in itself. Perhaps you want your work to speak to policy makers, members of the public, youth, or more. Whoever your audience is, we can use inclusive science communication as a way to expand the reach of our work. In this workshop we will think about our goals, audiences, and formats for science communication in context of your fall course projects or your capstone projects. We will go through a few reflection writing activities, so please bring something to write on like a notepad or laptop.


October 23, 2023

Blog Adding a blog to your existing Quarto website

Blog blog post | GitHub Square source code

Instructor: Sam Csik

Blogging about your data science adventures has a lot of benefits – it can help you to build your online profile/portfolio, practice your writing and communication skills, stay atop data science trends, solicit feedback from the community, network, learn new skills and/or solidify understanding, combat imposter syndrome, etc. In this workshop, we’ll learn how to add a blog to our Quarto website, customize posts, and (hopefully) get inspired to begin our blogging journeys!


October 16, 2023

SassAlternate CSS3 Logo Customizing Quarto Websites: Make your website stand out using Sass & CSS

Tv slides | GitHub Square source code

Instructor: Sam Csik

Quarto provides a user-friendly framework for creating your personal website – but adding your own creative touch can help make yours stand out from the rest. In this workshop, we learn how to (a) add a template to our landing page and update the _quarto.yml file to quickly add fun features/update the overall layout of our website, (b) create a stylesheet and define Sass variables to start modifying the overall theme (colors, fonts, etc) of our site, and (c) define CSS rules to make fine-tuned adjustments to our site’s appearance.


September 25, 2023

Window Maximize Creating your personal website using Quarto

File Lines instructional documentation | GitHub Square source code

Instructor: Sam Csik

A personal website is not only a great way to showcase your experiences and skills, but also gives people (potential employers included!) a better sense of who you are as a person. There are lots of great ways to build websites using R (e.g. {distill}, {blogdown}) – this year, we’ll be using Quarto, an exciting, new, and versatile publishing tool that supports R, Python, Julia, and ObservableJS.