We are working to build a year-long high school data science course with an emphasis on physical science and atmospheric science and with a focus on spreadsheet skills with Google Sheets and Excel. We plan to share the course materials for free to teachers both inside and outside Ohio. In Ohio, data science courses are required to follow the guidelines in this document from the Ohio Department of Education, which is overall similar to national guidelines on data science. The Ohio Department of Education also has an interesting discussion of the difference between high school statistics and high school data science that is discussed on page 6 of this document which we are carefully considering.
An important component of our data science course will be that we will leave room at the end of the course for students to study for the Excel industry credential exam. The state of Ohio has a program to pay the $100 per student cost of taking the exam (notice that the spreadsheet linked on this page includes a $100 reimbursement for “Microsoft Office Specialist Excel Associate (2019 or later)”). Similar reimbursement programs may exist in other states.
Here is our data science playlist on our youtube channel.
Here is our Earth Day hour of code activity
An important tool in the course will be the STEMcoding Object Tracker which is documented in this paper
Towards the end of the course students will use Stephanie Evergreen’s ebook Effective Data Visualization and the official Microsoft guide to the Excel credential exam