Kate Farrell (Director of Curriculum Development and Professional Learning) and Tommy Lawson (Schools Technology Advisor) attended the NC Data Science Education Summit (24-25 October 2024) as invited speakers, nominated by Data Science 4 Everyone (DS4E), a coalition created by the University of Chicago Center for RISC. The Summit unites practitioners from higher education, K-12, industry, and nonprofits to shape data-driven education in North Carolina.
Day 1 featured panel presentations from educators and young people from local high schools. On Day 2, Kate and Tommy held a session on Data Literacy in the schools. They highlighted how data skills can be applied across the school curriculum (i.e., Technology, Numeracy and Maths, Literacy, Social Studies) and suggested ways to deliver data literacy in the classroom, such as by using the PPDAC cycle .
They presented our Explorer Cards and Dear Data lessons, and some of our data visualisation resources such as Fizzy Data, the Data Selfie live lesson and data gathering activities with ribbon, toys, and simple objects like Lego brick bar graphs, tokens, and stickers (see our Weaving Data activity as an example).
They also talked about data-themes games, bringing the example of our Escape Rooms and the Data Cards created in Scotland, New Zealand, and the USA.
We are thrilled that we have been able to influence discussions around data literacy in the schools across the ocean, and we hope to share more of our work globally!