A Study on Data Science Education for Humanities: A Practical Case Study of the University-wide Basic Education at Yamaguchi Prefectural University

Today, big data can be easily obtained in our daily lives. As a result, keywords such as data science and machine learning are no longer new. Universities, private companies, and government agencies have established departments and faculties related to data science, and various educational programs are being developed. The implementation of data science education for liberal arts at regional public universities is an urgent national issue to be identified and solutions to be proposed. Yamaguchi Prefectural University started a lecture course called Introduction to Data Science for all first-year students in FY2022 with the aim of acquiring data science backgrounds. In this paper, we examine the state of data science education for students in the humanities by using data on the submission status of assignments given to students in this course in FY 2022. The results showed the possibility of visualizing the degree of difficulty that students in the humanities, who are taking data science education for the first time, experience during data analysis exercises and the degree of their positive attitude toward the assignments.