Data Science Meets Science Teaching

ABSTRACT

The use of large, open-source data sets is ubiquitous in scientific research. Scientists--ranging from meteorologists to chemists to epidemiologists--are researching and investigating critical questions using data that they have not themselves collected. To contribute to the growing effort to bring data science into classrooms, the authors have been implementing the NSF-funded "Data Clubs" project to examine using data sets on topics such as ticks and Lyme disease, COVID-19, and sports and leisure injuries. Much of this work takes place with youth in out-of-school settings. In addition to developing modules for youth, the authors worked with a group of 18 high school science and computer science teachers from Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts who participated in a virtual 15-hour workshop series on data science education over the summer of 2020. The goal of the workshop was to introduce teachers to real and complex data sets, models for scaffolding learning, and tools for working with those data sets. In this article the authors share some of the key findings from this effort.