Data Unit: Day One

(This is a day by day of the Data: Lets do the Numbers Unit in CS Principles. The overview is here.)

The idea is to grab their attention and get them really thinking about what data means in their lives.

I started with an activity from an Equity Workshop the CSTA held during this year's SIGCSE conference.

OK - real quick. Are you a member of the CSTA? If you are reading this you should be. Go ahead - it's free. I'll wait.

So the activity goes like this - turn off the monitors and grab paper and a pencil. I do this as our Fast Start, so the instructions are on the board when they walk in.

Tell them you are about to show them some data and they will respond to the following:

• What is your immediate Reaction?
• What questions do you have?

I gave them five minutes to respond on paper. Then they have five minutes to discuss with their elbow partner.

Here is the data:

Blood drive at the local high school reveals 20% of the students were HIV positive. 

I picked this because it is something every high schooler will have an opinion about. We had a blood drive this week, so they had lots of questions.

Their questions were fascinating...they wanted to know where the school was. One student hypothesized that it might be in Africa where Aids is more common.

The wanted to know who collected the data. They pointed out only kids 16 and older can give blood so that might throw the results.

Several groups also asked "is it true?" while working with their partner, but none of them were willing to ask that out loud with the whole group.

The whole point is to get them to really react to data. This is in fact not a true story - I found it on snopes.com (Snopes Article).

Then we talked about WHY they assumed it was true, or were uncomfortable questioning the truth of the data. The two reasons they gave were because their teacher told them and it had a % sign there. We all do that some time.

We then watched the Ted Talk:  Why Google won't Protect you from Big Brother

To pull everything together they did a journal entry about what we covered. I asked them to:

• Reflect on what we have talked about today
• Think about:
• Why is facebook free?
• If data can be false (like our activity) what does this mean for companies collecting data about you?
• Do you own your data?

Here is the listing of what we did:

Starting on Data
Today we are setting the stage for the Data project
• Fast Start: This activity is from the CSTA equity workshop I attended at SIGCSE last weekend
• Gallery Walk - Show off you best Code in the Browser piece (from work they did while I was @ SIGCSE)
• Ted talk - Why Google won't Protect you from Big Brother
• Look at Google transparency report
• Journal response
  • Reflect on what we have talked about today
    Think about:
    Why is Facebook free?
    If data can be false (like our activity) what does this mean for companies collecting data about you?
    Do you own your data?
• Homework - Data Log
  • Between now and next class keep track of times data is being collected about you and your family
  • As a group brainstorm times where data might be collected - what to look for