DataCamp Competitions: An Overview

Joining a Competition

To check the list of active competitions, select Competitions in the left-hand side menu of your Learn page.

Click on a specific competition to learn more about it.

The overview page provides you with all the important information about the competition. There are five elements that are always included: Background, Challenge, Prizes, Judging criteria, Timelines, and Rules.

The Background and Challenge give you an introduction to the competition’s objective and challenge.

If prizes are relevant, the Prizes section provides a breakdown of what prizes will be awarded to the winners. Prizes vary from challenge to challenge and may be swag, monetary, or other perks.

The Judging criteria section describes how to format your submission file and how your submissions will be evaluated. Each competition employs a metric that serves as the objective measure for how competitors are ranked on the leaderboard.

The Timeline has detailed information on the competition timeline. Most DataCamp Competitions include, at a minimum, two deadlines: 1) a submission deadline, after which no new submissions will be accepted, and 2) a voting deadline, after which no new upvotes will count towards final evaluation. It is important to keep these deadlines in mind.

Once you have chosen a competition, read and accepted the Rules, and made yourself aware of the competition deadlines, you are ready to start your analysis!

Creating a Workbook

A workbook is a collection of source, data, and configuration files that represents all of the work you are doing for certain data analysis. It corresponds to what would typically be a GitHub repository or an RStudio project.

To start your competition workbook choose a technology by clicking on the corresponding button—”Start with Python” or “Start with R”. In the workbook that is created a sample notebook is available with the competition overview and data to work with to write and run your analysis. DataLab comes pre-installed with all the common data science packages. You can also install additional packages, as described here.

You can do your entire data analysis in DataLab. DataLab automatically saves all your changes to the cloud, so you can easily continue at a later point.

Submit your Work

After you finish your analysis, it’s time to submit it. To submit your work, you need to create a publication of your workbook. Open your competition workbook, click the “Publish” icon in the sidebar on the left, select the notebook you want to publish (most likely notebook.ipynb) and click “Publish”. For full details on publishing, including the different ways to publish and deal with errors, check out the docs.

Once submitted, you’ll see a pop-up confirming your submission. You will also receive an email confirming your submission.

Note: After submitting your workbook by publishing it, you can still make changes to the workbook and update the publication.

DataLab privacy settings

The workbook you create to participate in the competition will be private by default. This means that only you can view and edit the workbook. The workbook will be made public when the submission deadline has passed and voting on the different submissions starts, so other DataCamp users as well as the DataCamp judges can find and view it. 

Once your workbook is public you can also share your submission with your network for upvotes. It’s possible and allowed to make your competition workbook public before the submission deadline. You can do that by clicking “Share” in the header and changing the sharing settings.

If your workbook is public, it will show up on your DataCamp profile as well as on the DataLab Community page, so others will be able to see your work (and be inspired by it).