Reflection on H.O.L#1

For this assignment, I was part of a research group that wanted to understand trends in movies. The people in my group were: Wouter, Brandon, Brooke, and Swan. We collected data about the domestic box office receipts of movies from 2004–2013 and wrote a Python script that summarizes that data.

In order to contribute to this project, we used Box Office Mojo to collect our data. With all honesty, we used this website because it was
suggested in the assignment protocol, but we should have compared the credibility of this before using the data. Now that I can look back and check this source, I can see that this website is an IMDB company. I learned that one should not trust any website.

Wouter took the lead on this assignment and he was able to direct our tasks. As a team, we decided to make our script based on the top three movies that made the most money from 2004–2013. My task was to make a dictionary using NotePad++ of the names of the top three movies and Brandon a dictionary of the money made in these years which covers the total gross income Wouter then took our dictionaries and combined them to start making our functions. We were having issues with our functions and Dr. Hemphill was able to help us with our function notation. Wouter made a function that calculates the amount of money made by each year as well as the total amount of money over all years. Brooke started working on the mean/median/mode functions and Wouter and I fixed the sinthax of all the functions and as a team we discussed python. Swan researched graphical functions. The hardest part of this assignment was fixing the mistakes and trying to make things work. Once all the functions were written, running the program was aslo difficult. We decided to use NotePad++ and then use Skulpt to run the code. Our code worked!! ☺

I really liked working in a team who was able to help each other with things we were not sure of. Code Academy/Python helped us tremendously by collecting statistics using Box Office Mojo. Thanks to the python script we wrote, we were able to capture, collect, and analyze data. If I were to do another similar project, I would compare different databanks and be more careful with the databank that will be used. I would like to compare the structure of each and explore the ins and outs of each source. In this class, I learned different techniques on how to search for a creatable data source and use python to write a code. This was my first experience with coding and I found the concept easy, but the synthax was very difficult. Not only will these skills be useful for my future research, but this assignment will help guide the final project for this class.