Data Science Goes Digital

In this chapter, we identify a set of electronic components with which we will build a range of different digital tools. These tools will be used to gather data, which is essential fuel for our journey into data science.

The objective of the book is not to show you how to code – it is to undertake activities that fall under the banner of ‘data science’.  Coding is a great skill to have of course, but a decent and useful level of data literacy can be attained without ever having written a line of code yourself.

• The book therefore does not try to introduce you to coding.
• There are a lot of great and free resources that do this very well.
• We use the BBC micro:bit extensively in the book, and there are a wealth of materials on the Micro:bit Educational Foundation’s website that will get you started with coding the micro:bit.

For this chapter, the code required to power the thermometer we use here can be accessed in MakeCode with this link.

Alternately you can download the pre-compiled file (in .hex format inside a .zip folder) with this link.

But it is probably quicker to type it in yourself: