The Introduction to Data Science (IDS) curriculum is designed to teach students in an introductory data science high school course to think critically about and with data. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for High School Statistics and Probability relevant to data science are taught along with the data demands of good citizenship in the 21st century.

Students using the IDS curriculum function as researchers by making truly unique findings about the world around them. Through collecting their own data using hand-held devices, and by examining data from formal sources, students learn to generate hypotheses, fit statistical and mathematical models to data, implement these models algorithmically, evaluate how well these models fit reality, and to think computationally while learning to program with data.

Students learn how to work with Participatory Sensing (collecting data through their smart phones) and R, a programming language that has long been the standard for academic statisticians and analysts in industry. Through R, implemented through the RStudio interface, students learn to code and to compute with data to develop graphical and numerical summaries to both communicate findings and to generate further exploration.

Overview of IDS Units

Unit 1: Data and Visualizations
Introduces students to fundamental notions of data analysis—such as distribution and multivariate associations and emphasizes creating and interpreting visualizations of real-world processes as captured by data

Unit 2: Distributions, Probability, and Simulations
Students use numerical summaries to describe distributions and introduces probability through the lens of computer simulations for informal inference

Unit 3: Data Collection Methods: Traditional and Modern
Prepares students to learn about the various ways of collecting data, including Participatory Sensing, and the effect that data collection has on their interpretation of the patterns they discover

Unit 4: Predictions and Models
Students learn to make and how to use mathematical and statistical models to predict future observations and how data scientists measure the success of these predictions

The curriculum is available for download. To have access to the full IDS technology suite, which includes year-round online technical and curriculum support, a subscription is required.