By Kimberly Mann Bruch
The Data Visualization Final Project Showcase, which was held last month, featured 36 student projects from the Fall 2025 offering of University of California San Diego School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences’ data visualization course. Each team contributed a public-facing website and many also produced an explanatory video.
This year, the course was themed around climate data with support from Professor Duncan Watson-Parris from the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI) and UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Student teams created a project around a climate dataset provided by Watson-Parris or proposed their own dataset to visualize. Projects covered topics as diverse as cloud cover in southern California, wildfire risk and NFL quarterback performance — reflecting an emphasis on socially relevant and data-rich storytelling.
“Something that stuck with me both during and after the showcase was how every student was very interested in the topic they were presenting,” said Vanshika Somani, a UC San Diego student studying data science. “It was especially fun to learn about the different projects because of how everyone talked about both the work behind each feature as well as the general look of the website they created. I loved learning about the fires across America, the website had seamless transitions with context about the next visualization and the presenters made sure to let us interact with the website while they spoke.”
By publishing every team’s work on a single, searchable showcase page, the course provided a public portfolio of student achievement and a template for project-based teaching in data visualization. Each listing with the showcase page links directly to the student-built site and, where available, a recorded presentation, making the showcase a living gallery of how the next generation of data scientists is learning to communicate complex stories with clarity and impact.
“Students showed remarkable creativity in building these final projects. The climate theme this quarter posed a new challenge for the course as well, since climate datasets are often large, time series, geospatial data that most students hadn’t had exposure to at this point in the curriculum,” said HDSI Professor Sam Lau, who teaches the class each year. “Despite these challenges, I thought the projects this quarter were among the very best that I’ve ever seen in this course.”
The class will be offered again in the Spring quarter, which begins March 30.
