The Inspiring Learning Festival has been running in the Kelso this week, with 2500 learners travelling from every Primary and Secondary school to try out exciting STEM and creative digital activities, including a couple of data science activities run by the Data Education in Schools Team.
On Tuesday, primary learners signed up to be trainee Agents of DATA, working for the Defence Against Temporal Attacks to protect Scotland against the high-tech VIKING villains! They used datasets of underground bunkers, wind farms, data centres and undersea fibre-optic internet cables to work out where the evil VIKINGS were building their new secret lair!
Image: Tommy Lawson, Kate Farrell and Jasmeen Kanwal.
On Wednesday, S2 learners worked in groups to analyse a data set and create a visualisation to represent the information they had analysed. It certainly helped their motivation that the ‘dataset’ was a bag of Haribo sweets and they were able to eat the sweets after they’d made their graphs!
On Thursday, teachers from across the local authority and visitors from further afield gathered together to listen to talks and try STEM activities at different stalls. The DES team spoke to teachers about teaching data literacy across the curriculum. We’re delighted that some of the teachers were so enthused they have signed up for the next professional learning sessions that the team are running. We look forward to welcoming them to our next course.
Find out more
4 day data literacy courses for primary and secondary teachers
Professional learning workshops (Edinburgh and South East Scotland schools)