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New Courses on Data Science & Climate Change!

March 19, 2024

Day of AI offers curricula and activities for elementary, middle school, and high school students intersecting with multiple content areas including History, Civics, Computer Science and Math. The program is completely free and accessible to students and teachers of all backgrounds and abilities.

This year, we have four new curricula focused on the intersection of Data Science & Climate Change! Check them out below:

        1. Description: This curriculum introduces students to basic concepts of data literacy through the lens of weather, and climate change. Using their basic external senses, students observe the natural world around them and graph their data for basic analysis and comparison.
        2. Prerequisites: N/A
        1. Description: Students learn the fundamentals of collection, analysis, and visualization of data collected from the environment. They collect weather data using Micro:bits, and then create an app to visualize collected data using AppInventor.
        2. Prerequisites: N/A
      1. Description: In this module, students use a data analysis pipeline and machine learning to work with global data sets to “tell a story” of the localized, human impacts of climate change.  Students will begin by learning the basics of Pandas (a Python library for data analysis), before exploring how data is collected, cleaned and prepared.
      2. Prerequisites: Basic Python knowledge (variables, lists, dictionaries, how to call functions)
    • IceMelt: Modeling and Predicting Climate Change (ages 14-18)
      1. Description: Students use AppInventor to analyze datasets containing measurements of lake ice data. They begin by creating apps displaying charts of lake ice measurements, and then use tools like trend lines, lines of best fit and anomaly detection to model and predict how Climate Change is likely to impact lake ice measurements in the future.
      2. Prerequisites: Familiarity with AppInventor.

We developed these courses for two reasons:

  1. We heard from many teachers about their desire to bring Climate Change as a content area into the conversation about AI.
  2. We wanted to highlight the importance of having a critical understanding of dataset design and collection as part of AI literacy.

Check them out, and we hope you like them!