Early Bridges Program Success
Author: Marshall V. King
Great Success Early in the Program
Early Bridges to Data Science had some Early Successes.
Eighteen teachers from Discovery Middle School, LaSalle Academy and Career Academy gathered at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business in late summer 2022. The three days together with professors in the IT, Analytics and Operations Department of Mendoza prepared them for teaching data science to their northern Indiana students.
Teachers Reflect on the New Data Science Curriculum
Dr. Fred Nwanganga – Professor of IT, Analytics and Operations Dept.
Taking on a new curriculum is challenging and difficult, yet the teachers persevered. “It’s been positive. The biggest challenge is just time,” said Fred Nwanganga, the Associate Teaching Professor in ITAO who started the program. He said the teachers have so much going on in a day that finding time to do something new is difficult.
Three teachers in the first cohort shared their experiences in the cohort and then in the classroom. Here’s what they said:
Chad Roggow, who teaches eighth-grade science at Career Academy, faced the challenge of time. His school implemented Cereal City Science, a STEM-based curriculum, this year. He then had the challenge of fitting what he’d learned last summer in Early Bridges into that program.
Roggow loves project-based teaching and learning and implements that in his classroom. His students did a research project on whether offering a deposit on aluminum cans that were refunded if they were recycled would result in more recycling. His students learned the difference between throwing something away and recycling it and the differences in recycling. “They came to the conclusion that we use too much plastic and it can’t be recycled forever,” he said.
Enhancing Data Science Education in the Classroom
Metal and glass can be recycled more easily than plastic, and, aluminum can be recycled forever. Learning that was eye-opening for his 80-plus students.
Next year, he hopes to do even more with the project and have students do more writing and analysis of their findings. He learned how he can approach teaching data science in other ways.
Early Bridges also gave him new tools. He hadn’t used a Google Form to gather data from others prior to the program and now regularly utilizes the tool, even for handling lunches on a student field trip to Chicago.
Melissa Scott, who teaches sixth-grade mathematics at LaSalle Academy, has been teaching 23 years but felt like a student again as she came to campus and interacted with professors. “It’s kind of priceless, really,” she said.
She had taught a data and statistics unit and was able to take what she learned and create five new lesson plans that would be part of a year with a new curriculum overall. “Everything was kind of fresh all at the same time,” she said.
She and two other teachers collaborated and created nearly a month of content. She taught examples from the Notre Dame professors at a middle school level and watched her students make connections early in the year. After the unit, she was able to add elements of data science to other lessons.
LaSalle Academy Considers Full Course Implementation
The success of the first year is leading the staff at LaSalle Academy to consider an entire course on data science. “We’ve got some good buy-in,” she said. “It was a good opportunity for us.”
Anita Weaver just completed her 30th year of teaching science to eighth graders at Discovery Middle School. Toward the end of the school year, she spent eight days with her 130-plus students, working with Google spreadsheets and graphs. Using population data, they created data tables and visualizations. “They really bought into it,” she said.
The school will have a new curriculum next year and she’s hoping that she’ll have time to teach using spreadsheets and the formulas that unlock their power. She worked with two sixth-grade teachers in the Early Bridges program to implement it at Discovery.
She is also a businesswoman who has sometimes taught spreadsheets in the classroom, but rarely had students take them to the level of visualizing through graphs and then presenting their conclusions. With the unit she built, she was able to have students do that. She watched students who had taken personal finance classes help others learn spreadsheets and formulas.
“Being able to see how our students will be able to use this information in the future and the skills in the future drove home for me how important it was to get them exposure at this age,” she said. “I was pretty impressed with the students and how well they took to it.”
