Project 10: CSV Story Explorer 📊

Difficulty: 🟢 Beginner

Run cells top to bottom. Each step builds on the previous one and saves real files under outputs/csv_story_explorer/.

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Description

Create a dataset, analyze it with pandas, and render a chart — your first data storytelling pipeline.

Libraries & Modules

• pandas — DataFrame, read_csv
• matplotlib.pyplot
• Built-in: csv, random

Python Concepts You'll Practice

CSV files, DataFrames, basic plotting, aggregation

🎛️ Parameter Variations

• NUM_STUDENTS — 10 vs 100 rows
• CHART_TYPE — 'bar', 'scatter', 'hist'
• SUBJECT — column to visualize
• COLOR — matplotlib color name or hex

# Install dependencies for this project (safe to re-run)
import sys
!{sys.executable} -m pip install pillow numpy matplotlib wordcloud qrcode[pil] python-barcode fpdf2 jinja2 folium plotly pandas scipy ipywidgets -q

Skipping pip install (already installed)

# Interactive Jupyter setup — run this cell first
%matplotlib inline

from pathlib import Path
from IPython.display import display, Image as IPImage, HTML, Markdown, Audio, IFrame

OUTPUT_DIR = Path("outputs") / "csv_story_explorer"
OUTPUT_DIR.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
print(f"✅ Outputs folder: {OUTPUT_DIR.resolve()}")

✅ Outputs folder: C:\Users\Hansel Yan\Projects\CodeItAll\outputs\csv_story_explorer

Step 1 — Generate sample CSV data

import csv
import random
import pandas as pd

# 🎛️ TWEAK THESE
NUM_STUDENTS = 30
SUBJECTS = ["Python", "Math", "Art", "Music", "Science"]
csv_path = OUTPUT_DIR / "student_scores.csv"

rows = [["name", "subject", "score"]]
names = [f"Student_{i:02d}" for i in range(1, NUM_STUDENTS + 1)]
for name in names:
    subject = random.choice(SUBJECTS)
    score = random.randint(55, 100)
    rows.append([name, subject, score])

with open(csv_path, "w", newline="", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    csv.writer(f).writerows(rows)

df = pd.read_csv(csv_path)
df.head(10)

	name	subject	score
0	Student_01	Python	81
1	Student_02	Art	61
2	Student_03	Math	97
3	Student_04	Math	65
4	Student_05	Art	85
5	Student_06	Science	67
6	Student_07	Python	56
7	Student_08	Math	72
8	Student_09	Math	84
9	Student_10	Music	60

Step 2 — Analyze and visualize

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# 🎛️ TWEAK THESE
CHART_TYPE = "bar"  # "bar" | "scatter" | "hist"
SUBJECT_FILTER = None  # e.g. "Python" or None for all
COLOR = "#6c5ce7"

plot_df = df if SUBJECT_FILTER is None else df[df["subject"] == SUBJECT_FILTER]
avg_by_subject = plot_df.groupby("subject")["score"].mean()

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 5))
if CHART_TYPE == "bar":
    avg_by_subject.plot(kind="bar", ax=ax, color=COLOR, edgecolor="white")
    ax.set_ylabel("Average Score")
elif CHART_TYPE == "scatter":
    ax.scatter(range(len(plot_df)), plot_df["score"], c=COLOR, alpha=0.7)
    ax.set_ylabel("Score")
else:
    ax.hist(plot_df["score"], bins=10, color=COLOR, edgecolor="white")
    ax.set_xlabel("Score")

ax.set_title("CSV Story Explorer — CodeItAll")
plt.xticks(rotation=45, ha="right")
plt.tight_layout()
out = OUTPUT_DIR / "csv_story_chart.png"
fig.savefig(out, dpi=120)
plt.show()
print(f"Chart saved to {out}")

Chart saved to outputs\csv_story_explorer\csv_story_chart.png

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✅ Project complete

Check your output folder: outputs/csv_story_explorer/

Next: Project 11: Fractal Tree Garden · Index