If you’ve been following along, and reading my mind over the past six months while I have been mostly not posting, you know I’m thinking a lot about data science education (as opposed to data science). In particular, I wonder what sorts of things we could do at K–12 —especially at high school — to help students think like data scientists.
To that end, the good people at The Concord Consortium are hosting a webinar series. And I’m hosting the third of these sessions Tuesday July 25 at 9 AM Pacific time.
Click this link to to to EventBrite to tell us you’re coming.
The main thing I’d like to do is to present some of our ideas about “data moves”—things students can learn to do with data that tend not to be taught in a statistics class, or anywhere, but might be characteristic of the sorts of things that underpin data science ideas—and let you, the participants, actually do them. Then we can discuss what happened and see whether you think these really do “smell like” data science, or not.
You could also think of this as trying to decide whether using some of these data skills, such as filtering a data set, or reorganizing its hierarchy, might also be examples of computational thinking.
The webinar (my first ever, crikey) is free, of course, and we will use CODAP, the Common Online Data Analysis Platform, which is web-based and also free and brought to you by Concord and by you, the taxpayer. Thanks, NSF!
We’ll explore data from NHANES, a national health survey, and from BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District. And whatever else I shoehorn in as I plan over the next day.
A Best-Case Scenario 