Kaggle Competitions in the Classroom: Retrospectives and Recommendations

ABSTRACT

Ruiz et al discuss the use of Kaggle in classrooms. Kaggle is an online data science platform best known for its public machine learning competitions. Since its inception in 2008, Kaggle has hosted thousands of competitions to advance research on a myriad of topics ranging from satellite imagery feature detection to COVID-19 research analysis. Besides hosting these global competitions, Kaggle has grown into an expansive data science educational platform that offers full courses, an open-source dataset repository, and a feature known as Kaggle InClass competitions (KICs). These KICs are contests specifically tailored for use in an academic setting that are completely customizable by the hosting professor or teaching assistant. In turn, the Kaggle platform provides a leaderboard, centralized location to access the competition data, and support for various popular code libraries.