RFID data imports in MS Access, and Tableau path tracking

This weekend will be spent completing a take-home exam that covers various analysis methods, and putting the finishing touches on the lab book that's due Thursday.  On Tuesday I'm making a short presentation to show some preliminary data views for our main class project.

The project itself is a pretty interesting concept.  The Junior League has held annual Christmas Bazaars for a couple years now, consisting of booths in the local convention center featuring merchants from the area, a "Breakfast with Santa" event for children, a Mother Daughter Tea, etc.  This year, in partnership with Ohio University's RFID lab, RFID readers were set up at various points around the convention center, and tags were concealed in each ticket.  We were interested in seeing how many people attended which events, what else they visited while there, traffic to certain booths, etc.

After speaking with the professor, I took it upon myself to visit the event prior to its kickoff, and make a note of which merchants were in which booths (perhaps there'd be a correlation between certain traffic patterns and types of wares for sale?  Never know if you don't look).  After we got the data back from the RFID team, I imported the data into an MS Access database, along with the merchant information, and coordinates that mapped to a jpg of the convention center layout.  Then using a basic sql query to join the table data, we could import the data in a useful format to Tableau.  In Tableau, we're experimenting with some path tracking, so we can see the tracks of visitors.  Our class has divided up into 4 teams, each covering 1 days of the event, and we're tasked with examining the data to answer specific questions posed by the professor, as well as any other useful patterns that pop up.  From here until the end of the semester, this is what we'll work on, and I'm looking forward to what we might find.

Our class on Thursday was enjoyable for me, since the professor asked me to teach the rest of the class about how to use the data and basic Access tools, then demo the import process and a quick sample data view.  I wish I had known ahead of time that I'd be asked to do this, since I would have come more prepared, but it was still a fun experience.  I've always enjoyed teaching, and this was a nice break in the usual life as a student.