A Collaboration between the University of Arizona and Lewis & Clark College to promote Data Science education
In 2021, we received a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation's Harnessing the Data Revolution grant program. The grant sub-category is Data Science Corps (DSC), which focuses on building capacity for HDR to help unleash the power of data in the service of science and society. The DSC provides practical experiences, teaches new skills, and offers learning opportunities, in a variety of settings, to data scientists and data science students.
Our focus is primarily on higher education, and finding commonalities and differences among approaches at a R1 institution (University of Arizona) and a small liberal arts college (Lewis & Clark College).
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| Greta Binford Professor of Biology Lewis & Clark College |
Jeff Oliver Data Science Specialist University of Arizona |
Katy Prudic Assistant Professor, Citizen and Data Science University of Arizona |
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| Ellen Bledsoe Assistant Professor of Practice University of Arizona |
Ethan Davis Digital and Data Science Specialist Lewis & Clark College |
Jeremy McWilliams Head of Digital Services Lewis & Clark College |
Mila Pruiett NSF Data Science Project Coordinator Lewis & Clark College |
Jill Williams Director, Women in Science and Engineering Program University of Arizona |
The grant has three specific aims:
- Broadening early participation through the General Education curriculum.
- Broadening participation through real-world experiences.
- Broadening instructional capacity.
Beginning fall of 2022, the two institutions taught a course titled "Data in the Wild". The course included the story arc of settling in Antarctica, and encountering and solving real world problems by learning and applying data science skills. At Lewis & Clark, the course was taught as part of the first year General Education course "Numbers", which broadly focuses and data literacy and numerical analysis. At Arizona, the course was taught within the Wildlife and Fisheries Science department, though counted toward General Education requirements.
The course will be offered again during the fall semesters of 2023 and 2024.
Course content is/will be available here.
During the spring semester, beginning 2022, the two institutions offered a course titled Applied Data Science Seminar. In this course, students build data science skills and leverage them to analyze data relevant to conservation stakeholders in the US Fish and Wildlife Service, AZ Department of Transportation, and the Phoenix Desert Botanical Gardens. In collaborative teams students will work together on organizing, cleaning, analyzing and visualizing monarch and milkweed data to help improve monarch conservation approaches and efforts in the southwestern US. Students will learn more about data science and project management best practices working as a team.
The course will be offered again during the spring semesters of 2023 and 2024.
The repository of course lessons and student projects is available here.
During summer of 2022, the grant team, led by Jeff Oliver, conducted a 6-week workshop series for faculty members at both institutions to help them integrate data science modules into their respective courses. The instructional content was based upon curriculum developed by the Data Carpentries organization. During the first three weeks, the instructional focus was on Data Science pedagogy. The second three weeks focused on practical skills and module building, using R and RStudio.
The workshops will repeat during the summers of 2023 and 2024.
Workshop content is available here.