#605: “The Amount of People that Like Hotdogs or Hamburgers”: How Youth Characterize What Data is and What They Can Do with It

Data science education has had a recent proliferation of reports, frameworks, and other resources to guide its continued growth. We also see an opportunity to understand the prior experiences that learners bring to their data science education, specifically the ways they characterize what data is and what it can do. We collected and qualitatively coded open-ended responses from 43 youth in two US cities to identify categories of how young people describe data and ways to use it. Salient in our findings are youth characterizations of data as actively collected and serving a purpose, often of creating new knowledge or communicating. Preliminary differences between 11-14-year-olds and 14-18-year-olds suggest ways these characterizations may change over time. We propose our identified characterizations as resources in studying how youth think about data and how to improve data science education.