The Arizona Chapter held its third DataFest competition and first with all three public universities in the state participating.

The planning committee included members from all three schools: Yi Zheng (co-chair), Yunpeng Zhao, and Jennifer Broatch of Arizona State University (ASU); Derek Sonderegger of Northern Arizona University; and Hao Helen Zhang of the University of Arizona.

As with many schools, planning began in 2019 for a 2020 DataFest, but plans were postponed due to the pandemic until the weekend of March 19, 2021, for a virtual version. For this, Zheng and Sonderegger became the key tech experts who configured the technology to support the event.

The committee tried to maintain as much similarity with a live event as possible. This included having a Zoom VIP breakout room at the beginning of Friday night for the event hosts to meet in with speakers for the opening ceremonies, an early virtual session for tech help and check-in, a general Zoom meeting for the general addresses and data unveiling, and individual breakout rooms for each team in which mentors could visit. Slack was also highly recommended for teams to use for collaboration.

The competition completion rate for teams was similar to that for live competitions, with 12 teams presenting this year.

The virtual opening night made for challenging coordination and validation of teams. In retrospect, having a better way to get students to form good working teams was needed. On the other hand, we were able to improve the mentoring aspect of the competition.

Sonderegger, along with Rodney Jee (DataFest co-chair) and ASU graduate student Diana Gonzalez, devised a new, more formalized mentoring process. Mentors were assigned to a subset of teams for which they did rounds during their shift. Each day, mentors were provided with a set of prompts they could use to initiate discussion with students.

This seemed to improve upon previous mentoring experiences. In the post-event satisfaction survey, the majority of students scored mentor satisfaction very high. In addition to the scores, the survey question about what students liked most received encouraging comments such as “mentors popping in and out” and “interaction between team members and mentors.”

The use of Zoom also scored very high, while the use of Slack was not nearly as high, though not low. Getting the most neutral reaction was the opening ceremony, while the team collaboration and data analysis elements were marked as most enjoyed/loved.

This chapter event served to bring members (such as Bart Hobijn of ASU who served as a judge and Shiwei Lan of ASU who served as a mentor) into activity from an otherwise dormant year.