This past fall, youcubed launched a new initiative to promote data science education as a way to prepare students for the 21st-century workforce and address problems with the current U.S. mathematics curriculum.
On Feb. 3, 2020, Steve Levitt and Jo Boaler hosted a groundbreaking event at Stanford focused on elevating data science to a more prominent place in K-12 education. Levitt is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago who interviewed Boaler on his Freakonomics podcast. They also co-authored an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times that called for putting data science at the center of high school mathematics.
At Levitt and Boaler's invitation, a group of 50 mathematicians, data scientists, teachers and education policy leaders gathered at Stanford for a daylong summit to explore questions about the challenges of incorporating data science education into K-12 schools. You can read more about the summit and see a video here. Boaler also was interviewed recently in USA Today for an article that discusses US mathematics education and the importance of data science.
Youcubed has several initiatives underway in this area:
* A new, free middle school data science unit of lessons, to be released in May. These six free exciting lessons will introduce middle school students to the fascinating and creative world of data science.
* A new high school data science course. Lessons will be trialed this fall and their hope is to have the course freely available for the 2021-2022 school year. The course is intended to be a college-approved option for students who are looking for a high school course that could be taken instead of, or as well as, calculus.
* A new online course that will introduce teachers of all grades and subjects to a 21st-century approach to teaching, which includes data science. The goal is to release the course in July and for it to be free to everyone.
http://www.youcubed.org