The last decade has seen unprecedented growth in the availability of data in most areas of human endeavor. Whole branches of science have been developed to allow corporations to transform the way marketing is conducted, to drive scientific progress in areas such as Bioinformatics, and to inform decision-making at all levels in governments and industry. Further, the scale and complexity of much of these data are beyond the capability of a single computer to manage or a single individual to analyze.
These realities generate a very significant imperative to ensure that there is an adequate supply of people entering the workforce who are equipped to handle the new challenges of learning from data. There is a compounding factor: on the evidence available, demand for data scientists is not only massively outstripping supply, but the situation is worsening, and this is a world-wide problem.
And beyond this, there is an equally pressing need for people in our societies to be more capable of understanding, interpreting and making decisions based on quantitative data as they cope with the vagaries of life.
The purpose of this international collaborative project is to transform the way education in Data Science is carried out in the last two years of school, with two objectives:
- To ensure that school students acquire a sufficient understanding and appreciation of how data can be acquired and used to make decisions so that they can make informed judgments in their daily lives, as students and then as adults. In particular, we envisage future generations of lawyers, journalists, historians, and many others, leaving school with a basic understanding of how to work with data to make decisions in the presence of uncertainty, and how to interpret quantitative information presented to them in the course of their professional and personal activities.
- To instil in more scientifically able school students sufficient interest and enthusiasm for Data Science that they will seek to pursue tertiary studies in Data Science with a view of making a career in the area.
Our goal is to provide the content for a pre-calculus course in Data Science that is fun to learn and fun to teach. A total of some 240 hours of instruction is envisaged. As a parallel development we will devise a program will enable teachers from a wide variety of backgrounds – basically any discipline that involves data, or mathematics teachers – to learn to present the course well. It is also planned to make the course available in a variety of modes of delivery.
The project will be carried out in two phases. The initial focus is on Phase 1.
- Phase 1: In the Curriculum phase (approximately 18 months), an international Curriculum Team (CT) comprising well-regarded computer scientists and statisticians, aided by an Advisory Group of computer scientists, statisticians, school teachers and curriculum experts, will develop curriculum frameworks for the student and teacher programs.
- Phase 2: In the Implementation phase, the curriculum frameworks devised in Phase 1 will provide the basis for developing resources to support courses in a variety of formats, suitable for different modes of delivery (classroom, MOOC, self-learning, ...).
The project involves computer scientists, statisticians, school teachers, curriculum experts and educators from Australia, Canada, England, Germany, New Zealand and the United States.