# Welcome!

Welcome!\
Let us have a look at an overview of what is waiting for you in the next weeks and in this project guide!

Every semester, the Product Development Team at TechAcademy thinks hard about a new project that is suited for you to learn data science. While for some semesters we deal with personal data, such as past Netflix and Spotify projects. In others, we have more natural sciences related projects taking on the topic of Covid-19,  or Honey & Bees. Or we turn more into business related topics by exploring AirBnb data, or bike sharing. Data science is best learned by doing it - no matter what data, we all have to start somewhere. 

This semester we decided to analyse an important part of our economy and lives in the beginners section: ports.  In the past few years we got to experience - and still experience - the effect of trade disruptions. Since trade via searoute is the most important path of trade, we found it interesting to have a close look at port data. In the advanced section, we will have a closer look at predicting and modelling GDP. Though none of us are experts in economics, trade and ports, we still believe that together we can learn a lot from this case study, while climbing the learning curve of coding and data science. 

This ports and economic variables project guide was developed and written entirely from scratch by TechAcademy’s Data Science team. Inga Lasys developed the project, with a focus for `R`, while Linh Ha Le, and Alexander Niedrig, Saman Bozorgvar, Simon Kühnle, Kamil Piwowar, André Minnert provided coding advice for`Python`. Thank you to Jan Bischoff for the helpful feedback!