About the Project

In a world where the importance of STEM education is ever increasing, the US still lags behind other developed nations in terms of students entering STEM fields. Within STEM, the ubiquity and advancements in computing techniques, together with the vast amount of data being collected and processed, have driven "data science" into the spotlight, enabling new waves of innovation in almost every industry and discipline. While the supply of data professionals is growing, it can hardly meet the much faster growing demand, let alone overcome the demographic disparities we continue to see. In addition, while more flexible learning modalities are needed, the optimal data science educational mechanism is not clear. To create inclusive pathways for students to data science and STEM, we will leverage rapidly growing interest in sports and sports analytics (including the growing field of electronic sports or esports) to inspire and engage a diverse pool of students while providing pedagogical resources and training to educators.

Project Goals:
  • Create a sustainable national network of academics, industry and government partners that will build the platform through which we will develop and ensure the sustainability of our efforts in elevating data science education, particularly in underrepresented populations and minorities.
  • Develop, implement, evaluate and disseminate an educational framework based on Case-based Learning, an authentic learning method involving real-world problems and applications. While this agile framework can incorporate different topics, our proposed project will focus on sports.
  • Support and generate educational research on different data science education delivery modalities (in-person, virtual, hybrid) for student and instructor subpopulations around the country.

This unique network of academic and industry collaborators will be responsible for the the development, dissemination, and delivery of educational modules. Our scope includes summer institutes and workshops that, building on existing team efforts, will be significantly expanded as well as delivered in hybrid mode (both in-person and virtual), supporting a more geographically diverse population and allowing for educational research on comparison of delivery modalities. To achieve sustainability, we will hold training workshops for educators to replicate and extend these efforts in their own environments.

As one example of providing case-based learning opportunities, SCORE with Data will create a repository of topic-based modules with material at several different levels.

The development of the SCORE with Data network is funded by the National Science Foundation (award 2142705).