Using Student and Teacher Feedback to Modify CS Curriculum

The CS education community has over the years recognized the importance of data science by including it in the seminal K-12 CS Framework. The move is prompted by research that shows data science is a great tool to broaden participation in CS because it offers students an opportunity to apply their computing knowledge to socially relevant problems. Broadening participation, particularly among underrepresented students, is critical to the future health and stability of the field. However, data science is still a relatively new in the context of K-12 schools and few CS teachers are pedagogically trained in data science. In order to test whether or not data science can be a tool to increase student representation in CS and help schools implement more data science curriculum, our project partnered with a local school district to modify an existing data science unit. This work explores the process of how our research practice partnership tackled the development of the new data science unit.