Teaching Data Science by Visualizing Data Table Transformations: Pandas Tutor for Python, Tidy Data Tutor for R, and SQL Tutor

Abstract

Data science instructors often find it hard to explain to students how a piece of code written in Python, R, or SQL executes in order to transform tabular data. They currently resort to hand-drawing diagrams or making presentation slides to illustrate the semantics of operations such as filtering, sorting, reshaping, pivoting, grouping, and joining. These diagrams are time-consuming to create and do not synchronize with real code or data that students are learning about. In this paper we show that a step-by-step visual representation of tabular data transforms can help instructors to explain these operations. To do so, we created a table visualization library that illustrates the row-, column-, and cell-wise relationships between an operation's input and output tables. On top of this library we built a trio of free web-based visualization tools - Pandas Tutor for Python, Tidy Data Tutor for R tidyverse, and SQL Tutor - that run users' code and automatically produce diagrams of how Python/R/SQL transforms data tables step-by-step from input to output. Since launching in Dec 2021, over 61,000 people from over 160 countries have visited our website to try out these tools.