Back to the Methods of Teaching Data Science course Back to Technion Data Science Education website
This lesson focused on the Israeli high school data science curriculum. First, the students were asked to locate the Israeli data science high school curriculum on the web. The rationale of this task (as opposed to simply presenting them with the curriculum website’s URL) is to illustrate that all of the computer science and data science material is available on the Ministry of Education’s website, and is maintained by the chief coordinator of the K-12 computer science education in Israel. After discussing the students’ search strategies, the following topics were addressed:
- The name of the program “Data analysis and machine learning” highlights the duality of data science: On the one hand it inherits its algorithmic aspect from computer science, and on the other hand, it inherits a focus on data from the field of statistics.
- Since the high school data science unit is part of the high school computer science curriculum, the computer science component of the program reflects the algorithmic facet of data science and so the machine learning algorithms are taught implementing a white box approach.
- Koby Mike, one of the developers of the data science study program, shared the development process of the program with the class.
- The variety of data science ideas included in the study program.
- The final project development as part of the data science study program (30 of the 90 hours): As seen in Table 1 (in Grading policy and submissions), the prospective data science teachers are required to develop a project as part of Task 4 of the course,. The intrinsic motivation of the pupils in the process of the project development is emphasized and accordingly, the prospective teachers are encouraged to select a data base for their development project that is taken from an application domain they are interested in. In the future, they should encourage their pupils to select topics for their projects in a similar way.