Inaugural ASA DataFest helps students apply skills learned in the classroom

Tuesday, May 13, 2025

DataFest teams used critical thinking skills and data analysis to help answer real-world questions and summarize the data in a presentation.

This spring, in a large meeting room near the north end of the College of Business Administration building, more than 20 undergraduate students huddled together over laptops and abundant amounts of snacks.

Their goal? To work together to analyze a complex set of industry-provided data and put together a winning presentation — and to do it all in less than 40 hours.

K-State's Institute of Digital Agriculture and Advanced Analytics, or ID3A, last month hosted a local competition as part of the national American Statistical Association's DataFest. The competition challenges teams of up to five students each to apply their learning and reveal insights from a large and rich data set provided by an industry data sponsor.

Students from several fields of study — including statistics and data science, political science, computer science, entrepreneurship and innovation, and accounting — participated and competed for prizes in several categories.

Isaac Smith — senior in statistics and data science and a member of team Stats Cats, which won the Best of Show prize — said that participating in DataFest allowed him to explore new concepts and prepare for real-world challenges he’ll eventually face in his career.

"I believe that regardless of your specific discipline, DataFest is a great way for you to challenge yourself and learn to showcase your ideas to your peers," Smith said. "Even without coding or data experience, you can still be innovative and brainstorm new ideas, learning how to present those ideas to other professionals."

The event allowed students to work with industry data in a way that they wouldn’t normally encounter in a typical statistics or data science course. Each team used critical thinking skills and data analysis to help answer real-world questions and tell the "story" they found within the data set.

Experienced graduate student mentors were present throughout the weekend to assist the teams with their presentations. Abraham Arbelaez, a second-year doctoral student studying statistics and president of Stat Club, served as a mentor and led a data visualization workshop at the event.

"Every team was unique in their own way," Arbelaez said. "They were all given the same prompt and data, but all presented a different way of thinking. This event offered the opportunity to use real-world data and helped the students develop their problem-solving skills."

Student success rewarded

The following teams and students were recognized at the conclusion of the competition.

• Best in Show: Stats Cats — Yuan Gao, junior; Tinashe Sekabanja, graduate student; and Isaac Smith, senior, all in statistics and data science.
• Best Insight Award: Cluster Buster — Jared Paubel, senior in integrated computer science; Aaliyah Le, sophomore in integrated computer science; and Arron Weber, senior in computer science.
• Best Visualization Award: Voices of Data — Daniel Robertson, senior in computer science; Taryn Day, junior in statistics; Caitlin Sand, junior in environmental science; and Ethan Coleman, senior in computer science.
• Best Use of Outside Data Award: Databased — Connor Bauer, sophomore in computer science; Henry Glen, senior in computer science; David Webb, junior in entrepreneurship and innovation, accounting and nonprofit leadership studies; Leo Chen, junior in computer science; and Ethan Eurich, junior in computer engineering.

Shawn Hutchinson, codirector of education for ID3A, said the institute plans to host a second DataFest next spring as a continued investment in providing students with applied learning experiences outside of the classroom.

"The undergraduate competitors were engaged, energetic, and interacted closely with our tremendous graduate student mentors all weekend long as they exercised data analysis methods and scientific communications skills," said Hutchinson, professor in geography and geospatial sciences and director of geographic information systems spatial analysis laboratory. "We’ve already started preliminary planning for next year’s DataFest and look forward to more students engaged, more departments involved and more industry representatives mentoring and evaluating student projects."

Other sponsors for the event included K-State's departments of entomology, geography and geospatial sciences, computer science and statistics, as well as the K-State Stat Club and the Kansas-Western Missouri Chapter of the American Statistical Association. The College of Business Administration provided facilities.