SDS 271 — Final Projects

Smith College · Spring 2026 · Instructor: Javier Burroni · Pedagogical Partner: Nicole Choi

Student-authored Python tutorials

Each project below is a Jupyter notebook tutorial written by a group of students introducing a Python library through a worked example. Click a card to open the rendered notebook.

Map of bike trail connectivity across the Five College area
Geospatial visualization

Geopandas & Folium Tutorial

Flora Resika, Karolina Suarez Aldarondo, Katarina Flöer

A walkthrough of geopandas and folium for spatial data, using the Five College area to demonstrate basic maps, choropleths, line layers, and spatial joins.

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Plotly line chart of life expectancy in Canada, Mexico, and the United States
Interactive plotting

Plotly Tutorial

Amber Zhang, Anna Zhao, Helen Zhou

An introduction to Plotly Express and Graph Objects: when to use Plotly, the two core interfaces, and building interactive figures from a real dataset.

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Scatter plot of country clusters by GDP and happiness score
Machine learning

Scikit-learn: Predicting Happiness

Aliyah Ismail, Eugenie Kawera, Doreen Musahara

A scikit-learn tutorial that uses the World Happiness Report to predict country happiness scores from indicators like GDP, social support, health, and freedom.

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OLS regression results table for a wages model
Statistical modeling

Statsmodels Tutorial

Tabitha Githinji, Najma Golicha

An introduction to statsmodels for inference and explanation, contrasted with R's stats package, applied to a wages dataset to answer concrete research questions.

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