Participation in Back to School Power BI competition progress

As mentioned in my previous post, all kids have been working hard on their power bi files.

The following are the topics chosen by the kids for the Back to School Power BI competition (4 groups)

Career Pathways
Climate Changes/News
Road Safety
Historical Events

I had a chance to look at the first draft of the power BI files created.  Suggested some changes to improve them further. 

One of the groups were having difficulty in getting the data into Power BI, so helped them with that. 

One of the groups started developing the power BI visualisations directly in the app.powerbi.com as they thought that sharing between them would be easier.  Since you cannot convert the visualisations developed in the app to power bi desktop file, they had to recreate everything in the power b desktop from scratch.  This was a big learning for them.  But they quickly did that.

One of the groups wanted to know how to get data from a website, so pointed them to my webinar on "Top 10 tips" which they could use to create their visualisations.

The Road Safety group created a game that was meant to be interactive.  But when I tried to use it, I didnot find that it was very interactive.  So I have suggested to make some changes.

Some of the photos from this catch up

Free Databases and Data Visualisations course for kids Week 5 update

Databases and Data Visualisations course for kids aged between 9 to 14 years week 5 update. Had a great time on Monday with 10 kids and 2 parents attending the SQL course. #sqlfamily #microsoftnz 

There was no class last week as I was away in Melbourne at the #powerplatformsummit.

So there was almost a 2 week gap so I revised all that they have learnt so far in the last 4 weeks by asking them a lot of questions.  Most of the questions some of the kids answered them right but the revision helped them to understand a bit more.

I was pleased to see most of the kids eagerly answering my questions. I felt that now all the kids are able to genuinely understand what I am trying to teach them.

This week they learnt some of the basic SQL functions like Min, Max, Count, AVG, SUM.  String functions like Left and Right.

In the next session I am planning to cover the importing of data from a csv and also will try and explain joins to them.

I am looking forward for the session on next Monday.

My presentation at the Power Platform Summit Melbourne Australia

I really enjoyed presenting at the Power Platform Summit, Melbourne Australia.  The topic was "Top 10 things every Power BI creator should know.

Had really good audience who were really engaged and with a lot of questions.

Here is the link to the session materials
https://github.com/indupriya9/powerplatformsummit2019

Free Databases and Data Visualisations course for kids Week 4 update

Databases and Data Visualisations course for kids aged between 9 to 14 years week 4 update. It was another full house on Monday with 12 kids and 4 parents attending the course. #sqlfamily #microsoftnz  

The first 45 minutes were spent in solving issues with questions like --
- 'I created a table but I cannot see it'
- 'Why is my insert statement not working ?'
- 'I have inserted a lot of duplicate records.  How do I delete them ?'
- 'I am getting a syntax error'

After this, when I did the recap of what happened last week, I was pleased to see most of the kids eagerly answering my questions. I felt that now all the kids are able to genuinely understand what I am trying to teach them.

The agenda for this week was to explain the update and delete statements.  The Like and In operators in the where clause.  Some of the basic SQL functions like Min, Max, Count, AVG, SUM.  String functions like Left, Right and Substring.

It is interesting to see how some of the kids think.  One of them asked what if we accidentally deleted all records ?  Is there an undo?

As usual I felt very happy to see the enthusiasm in these kids. I am looking forward for the session on next Monday.

Initiating kids to participate in Back to School Power BI Competition organised by Microsoft

I have seen this tweet from Charles Sterling regarding Back to School Power BI Competition.

Announcing Power BI “Back to School” Contest! https://t.co/P7wDM3YJjl

— Charles Sterling (@chass) August 4, 2019

Since I have taught Power BI for 11 11 to 15 year old kids last year, I thought lets try and submit a few Power BI files if they are interested.  So I had a session with them today where I went through the Back to School Power BI competition rules.  I have initially created 3 groups making three 16 year olds as leaders to these 3 groups. 

I have asked them to spend some time and come up with ideas for creating Power BI visualisations for this competition.  Each team came up with a few options. 

The three 16 year old kids came to me and said that they want to make a separate group and create an app using Power BI that is useful for high school kids to choose their career pathways.  So the 4th group was created.

Now we have 4 groups trying to create Power BI visualisations.  I am anxiously waiting to see what they finally decide to work on.  We are meeting again in a week's time

Free Databases and Data Visualisations course for kids Week 3

Free Databases and Data Visualisations course for kids Week 3
Databases and Data Visualisations course for kids aged between 9 to 14 years week 3 update. It was a full house yesterday with 15 kids and 5 parents attending the course. #sqlfamily #microsoftnz

During my recap of what happened last week, most of the kids wanted to answer all of my questions.  For the homework that I have given, Imost of them completed the creation of the tables.  But everyone forgot to create the foreign keys.

There were only 2 challenges faced by the kids when they were doing their home work. First was when they had a space in the database or table name. Second was the table was not created in the new database they created.

The agenda for week 3 was to show them how to insert data into the tables and view the data.  I could just cover select statement and basic where clause and the time was up.

I feel very happy to see the enthusiasm in all of these kids. I am looking forward for the session on next Monday.

Below are few photos from the session.