Let them eat cake (first)!

Backwards design, designing educational curricula by setting goals before choosing instructional methods and forms of assessment, is a widely accepted approach to course development. In this talk we introduce a course design approach inspired by backwards design, where students are exposed to results and findings of a data analysis first and then learn about the building blocks of the methods and techniques used to arrive at these results. We present this approach in the context of an introductory data science course that focuses on exploratory data analysis, modeling, and effective communication, while requiring reproducibility and collaboration. The talk is organized in three parts (visualization, data acquisition, and modeling) and features examples of in class activities, details of the course curriculum, and sample student work.