Civic Action Through Computer Science is CPS's first (and to the best of my knowledge, only) dedicated data science class. The course was developed for Lane and started in the 2020-2021 school year.
Students learn a toolset of skills in programming, statistics, and communication to help understand and tell a story with data. In our class, we aim to put those skills to work helping students describe and impact their community in our second semester, through student-selected topics for small group work and a full-class capstone project.
No prior skills or experience are necessary--the course is designed to help students of any future major/career to build data literacy skills. That said, prior programming or statistics experience will allow students additional opportunities for practice to build upon and go more in depth with the application of those skills.
All students are expected to have a journal, composed of a three-ring binder and blank notebook paper. Taking notes is incredibly important for this class, as these notes will serve as a guide for students to explore and test their data science skills.
Students will use their CPS-issued Chromebook to access Google Colab, which will be the primary means we will be doing data analysis.
The course adapts content from the Data Science Discovery curriculum from the University of Illinois. That course is taken by hundreds of UIUC students each year, and it makes the content accessible for students of all majors.
Every year students collectively select and analyze a topic of their choosing, ideally related to a community they are a part of. Students select the year's topic around December and begin work in March, with students breaking into work groups to approach individual aspects of the topic.
Prior capstone student work examples are below.
I've never programmed before. Would I be able to do well in this class?
Yes! Many of the students who take this class have no prior programming experience. By the end of the year, some of the students who have achieved the most in class projects learned all of their programming skills in our class. Between the content covered in class, direction to learn more skills specific to your interests, and your genuine curiosity, there is so much that you can do! This can help you build a solid foundation of data analysis and literacy useful in a broad spectrum of careers, and not just within the field of computer science.
Should I take statistics before this class?
Taking statistics is not required for this class. If you have taken or concurrently take statistics class you may find this class reinforces some of what you learn there, and certainly this course can be an introduction before taking a full statistics class as well.
Is this class going to be useful for me? Can't AI do a lot of this work?
Currently for data analysis, many of the AI systems that process data are not fully transparent in their process. This means that there is not always a clear, verified path from how the data gets analyzed to the results that you might see. This can leave room for some very significant errors, and I would expect many industries to have humans do the thorough checking of the processes used. So even as AI systems allow for more automation, there will still be a need to verify the results, and that requires a solid understanding of the data analysis skills that are employed--which is what we practice!
Additionally, AI still doesn't quite do as good of a job at formulating the right questions to ask to gain insights. Just having a bunch of data does not automatically supply understanding--you need to know what to ask and look for to find meaningful discoveries.
And of course, the AI systems themselves are built and trained through data science skills. Our class serves as an introduction to that path, as well.
What if I'm not a "computer science" person? Can I still succeed in this class?
Succeed? Absolutely! But I would disagree that there are "computer science people." The thinking behind computational thinking that we will be practicing long predates computers, and was practiced by people all over the world for thousands of years. We simply have the accumulated skills and tools of generations to do more. At the heart of computer science is a foundation of logic and problem solving, and that practice can benefit everyone regardless of their prior experience and future career goals--you will learn more than just making apps!