#16 - Finding the fun in Data Science - Data Literacy for Kids

This week’s post comes to us from Shashank Srikant, a data science enthusiast and Ph.D. candidate at CSAIL, MIT.

---

Having gone digital has made data abundantly available across verticals in our society today. We now have the means to access and understand how we transact with the world around us over time. A question that naturally follows is - how do we get today's children equipped to embrace this new world order. I had the opportunity to address this question a couple of years ago when working at Aspiring Minds Research (research.aspiringminds.com). Along with Varun Aggarwal, we created what was probably the first hands-on exercise to convey to 10-15-year-old children the essence of data science. This was a half-day activity, where kids went through the full-cycle of a data science project - right from gathering data, cleaning it, modeling it, visualizing it, and then drawing insights from it.

Our central objective was for children to have fun when exploring these tasks while ensuring that they didn't get bogged down by the demands of the tools required to perform the tasks. 

While the specifics of our activity are documented well on our web page datasciencekids.org, I reflect here on how parents can facilitate "data literacy" in their children.

"Data literacy" to me is the ability to look at data pertaining to a task over time, which allows coming up with a non-trivial insight or understanding of the task. I identify common tasks in every household which could benefit from some basic data analysis; some of these tasks I share here were suggested by children themselves at the end of our activity when we'd asked them to reflect similarly. Here goes -- 

• Managing finances -- This was perhaps the most common task which the children saw through too. Tracking monthly expenses lends itself for analyses -- the format of data is plain numbers,  there's a clear way to organize expenses -- groceries, entertainment, utility bills, etc. Examining these numbers and trends weekly or monthly is a short enough time frame to keep children engaged. Insights could be around how category expenses change over months. Festival months may witness certain spikes, summer holidays some other. An advanced extension could perhaps look at how mutual funds and stocks which you parents may have invested in are behaving. A textbook example, I'd say.

• Electricity, Water, and other utilities -- This is another nice set of tasks which can exercise one’s data skills. Every house invariably has a leaky faucet, or a light always switched on, or water motors turned on for longer than they should've been (a common sight in India). The effects of such misuse can easily be measured by children. As much as we hate it, another form of (mis)usage which we all want measurements of is our screen-time. Measuring the amount of time spent on phones and screens can perhaps yield an insight that may force us to change old habits? Notice, to measure and collect data here, we may need to engineer and innovate simple solutions -- a simple Raspberry Pi driven sensor to measure water leaks, etc. This sets up some more avenues for children to engage in. See some of the delightful work being done by Bengaluru-based civic action organization Reap Benefit (https://reapbenefit.org/) on such topics.

• Civic issues -- I believe we desperately need to do more to make our children ‘civic aware’. A primary reason for dysfunctional public institutions such as hospitals, schools, courts, etc. around us, in the Indian context at least, is our apathy towards them. We conveniently want all our children to be these rock star academics and yet hesitate to expose them to the state of realities in our surroundings, and worse, shield them away actively from interacting with them. It is in our long-term interest to make them curious about how these institutions work and what their present conditions are. That’s where the real problems are which children can help solve. Get your children to visit a couple of such institutions closest to you and get them to observe and collect data on how things function there.

  See this article on how an enthusiastic teacher in a small public school in New Delhi stirred 10-year-olds to carry out an analysis of the state of education and reading levels around them. https://teachforall.org/news/taking-learning-their-own-hands%E2%80%94and-streets

There are many more I can go on about, like sports, or measuring heights and weights, which lend themselves nicely to such data analyses. Do share as comments other activities you can think of.

While these ideas may all seem exciting and obvious to get children involved in, here are some important caveats to keep in mind --

No free lunch

While such activities are easy to list out, the secret sauce is you! Parents, teachers, and caregivers putting in your energy and showing them the way initially. How successfully a child executes any such project will invariably boil down to how involved the parents are — in laying out a clear problem, monitoring progress, and getting them to articulate the big picture and question critically what they find out. That just means more homework for you parents. Sorry, that’s the only way there is.

One size does not fit all

Your enthusiasm for a particular task may not necessarily be shared by your children. Make sure you open up a conversation with them, gradually introduce these notions, and see what really excites them. Perhaps try a short project first to whet their appetite. You’ll be surprised by the breadth and depth of ideas they’ll come up with if you give them that space. 

An inference one may be tempted to make from my notes above is perhaps these tasks and activities are positioned heavily towards science and engineering. I disagree. I believe when exposed at the technical level I’m suggesting here, these are skills which will open up children’s ability to analyze any situation, something which cuts across disciplines.

Here are some very interesting resources from academia on data literacy for children

• https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3025453.3025847

• https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3025453.3025823

• Building data literacy and capacity in different verticals: http://rahulbotics.com/papers/

Let me know if you try any of these ideas out. You can reach me on first-name.last-name at gmail.com; I’ll be happy to engage. All the best!

Shashank.

---

Shashank is currently working towards a Ph.D. in computer science, specializing in machine learning, software engineering, and neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before his academic stint, he worked as a research engineer at a corporate research lab and then spent a year in Bihar understanding how welfare policies run by the government are implemented.