This blog post was written by Erin McDermott, 6th Grade ELA Teacher/Instructional Facilitator, Reedy Creek Magnet Middle School Center for the Digital Sciences, Cary, NC. Her session, Data Science Solutions: Applying Computational Thinking Through Whole-School PBL, will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday, November 7 at the Professional Conference.

A little over a year ago, I walked into the Friday Institute at North Carolina State University for a data science summit that would eventually end up touching the lives of every student at my school.  The summit highlighted the importance of introducing data science across all curriculums in the K-12 range.  As a sixth-grade ELA teacher and Instructional Facilitator at Reedy Creek Magnet Middle School Center for the Digital Sciences in Cary, NC, I could see immediate opportunities for application at our school.  

Digital Sciences can be a hard magnet theme to pin down.  At our school, it is showcased in electives in computer science, mechatronics, and emerging technologies.  We also live and breathe our theme in our core classes as well, where students use computational thinking in all classes across the curriculum, and coding is a part of each and every class.  However, we’re always looking for opportunities to push the magnet further, as we’re in a constant race to keep up with the development of new technologies.  Our students also come to us with more and more digital experience and savvy each year.  Almost a decade in, it feels hard sometimes to keep the magnet fresh and current.  We’d talked about project-based learning units before as a way to encourage students to use CT to solve problems and create with technology.  However, the Data Science Summit provided the inspiration to finally engage.  

Our magnet coordinator and I decided to go big – to write a data science project-based learning unit that would be taught across all three grade levels, focused on how to use computational thinking and a data inquiry framework laid out by the InSTEP With Data program at NC State to solve a significant problem faced by our world, community, and school.  Each grade level received a different global issue to investigate and followed the steps of the data inquiry process to form questions, generate data, investigate, clean, and represent that data, and finally develop and present solutions to help lessen the problem at the school level.  It has led to real, student-innovated change in our building.  

Join me at NCSSS for an overview of the benefits of computational thinking and data science for kids at all grade levels.  I’ll give you a window into our data inquiry process and an overview of how we supported and engaged our staff.  You’ll get a glimpse of how this approach has led to changes that students can see in their building every day.  Finally, you’ll have a chance to reflect on how data science and computational thinking could fit into your building or classroom!