- introduce some of these standard tools to children aged 7-17
- provide some experience of methods like data loading, cleaning, visualisation, exploring, machine learning
Data Science and Python
Data Science is a bread term which covers a range is valuable skills - from coding to machine learning, from data engineering to visualisation.Python has become the leading tool for data scientists by far - and some of tools in the Python ecosystem are not just defacto standards, but familiarity with them is pretty much expected. These standard tools include the jupyter notebook and libraries like pandas and scikit-learn.
I think it is incredibly advantageous for children to have some experience with these tools, and I think it is important for them to practice some of the data science disciplines, such as data cleaning and visualisation.
Taster Workshops for Kids
The series of workshops was supported by a grant from Numfocus and the Jupyter Project. NumFocus is acharity whose mission is to promote open practices in research, data, and scientific computing. They support many of the open source data science tools you very likely already use. You can read a blog announcing the supported projects here:
Mini Projects For Kids
It is always a challenge to create activities for children that are engaging and also meaningfully help children learn something new.
Activities need to be small enough so they don't overwhelm, and of a duration that matches a child's comfortable attention span.
It helps if the activities can be i the form of a story - to make the ideas more real and relatable.
Furthermore, in single workshops there is limited scope to take children through a lot of pre-requisite training in Python - so the activities need to have a lot of the boiler-plate work removed or already done. This means a carefully thought out balance between "pre-typed code" and instructions and questions which as a child to experiment and explore, or solve a puzzle.
In my own experience, it helps to avoid any kind of technical complexity like installing and configuring software. Web-based tools that require no installation work best in the limited time, attention and diverse setting of a children's workshop.
With this in mind I came up with a series of projects at different levels of difficulty, all using Google's hosted colab notebook service.
Demonstrating Python and the Jupyter Notebook
At the start of each workshop I talked briefly about the importance of data science at a global scale as well as its relevance to Cornwall.
I then demonstrated basic Python and the Jupyter notebook to show how it works, and to illustrate how easy coding with Python is. I showed how the notebook is just a web page with fields to fill in and run using the "play" button. Having no need to install any software and configure it was a major relief!
The basic python was simply variables, print statements, progressing onto using a list of children's ages, and using operations on the list like max() and len(). The lack of a mean() or average() was nice point to show that it is common to pull in extension libraries that implement features not part of the core Python. I showed how to import pandas, and demonstrated the dataframe, which does have a mean() function. I then showed how easy it was to plot a dataframe as a linechart, and change it to a bar chart, and then a histogram.
I emphasised the important point that learning all the instructions of a language or its libraries is not the aim. A more important skill is being able to search the documentation and reference sites to find how Python and its libraries can be used to achieve your task.
0 - Getting Started
This short worksheet helps children and their parents or carers get set up to use the Google hosted notebook service.
It makes sure they have a Google account, and helps them create one if needed, and tests access to a simple hosted notebook to check everything is working.
1 - Hands And Fingers
This is a project suitable for younger children. It focuses on measuring the length of fingers on each hand and collecting that data.
The idea of a DataFrame is introduced, and these are used to plot charts showing the lengths. Very simple statistics are explored - the minimum, maximum and mean of a column of data. Children are encouraged to explore how their left and right hands are different using the statistics, but also see how it is much easier to see when the data is visualised.
The following photo shows a bar chart comparing the lengths of left and right hand using different colours for each hand.
The Hand and Fingers project and printable rulers are online:
2 - Garden Bug Detective
The next project starts simple and is set in a friendly story about a robot that collects items from the garden.
The robot doesn't know what it has picked up. It only knows how to measure the width, length and weight of the items.
The children are encouraged to visualise the data to get a high level view of it before diving into any further exploration. This time the first chart isn't very enlightening.
The idea of a histogram is introduced to see the data in a different way. The following photo shows a girl exploring a histogram which clearly shows that the data seems to have two groups - a good start to further exploration.
One child worked out how to show three data series on the same histogram chart!
Scatter charts were introduced next, and this visualisation revealed three definite clusters in the data.
With all these visualisations, the children were encouraged to vary what was plotted, and to use a search engine to find out what the code syntax should be.
The project then progresses to use the sklearn library to perform k-means clustering on the data. The children were excited to be using the same software used by grown-up machine learning and AI researchers!
Seeing the computer identify the group clusters was exciting, and even more exciting was providing the trained model with new data to classify.
I felt it was important for the children to have seen this training and classification process at least once at first hand. I think it will place them in good stead when they consider or see machine learning again in future.
It was great seeing children as young at eight using sklearn to train a model, and use it to predict whether a garden item was a word, ladybird or stone!
The project is online:
2a - Secret Spy Messages
The next project focussed again on an engaging story to wrap an interesting data science concept.
One spy, Jane, is trying to get messages to another spy, John, but the messages arrived messed up by noise, probably caused baddie. Jane tries to send the message 20 times.
The children were asked to look at 20 messages to see if they can spot the hidden message. The photo below shows a child looking at these noisy images.
This project introduces images as data, and encourages the children to explore mathematical or other operations on images. The project also demonstrates getting data through a URL and opening the received zip file.
The matplotlib library is extensively used to show bitmap images, which are 2d numpy arrays.
After the students try subtracting images, and failing, clues encourage them to add images. All the students discovered that adding more and more images seemed to reveal an image.
After that revelation, which seemed to excite the children, they were encouraged to think about why adding noisy images together seems to work.
The children, and especially the parents, found it very exciting to see a theoretical idea - average value of random noise being zero - applied in this useful and practical way.
The project is online:
3 - Mysterious Space X-Rays
The next project is a significant challenge for the more confident, enthusiastic or able children.It uses real data from a NASA space mission which measures radiation from space. Often the only way to identify objects in deep space is to look at the only thing that gets to us on Earth - radiation.
The Cygnus X-3 system is a mysterious object which behaves in ways which aren't like the standard kinds of stars or other space objects.
The children are encouraged to explore the data and use any idea they have to extract any insightful pattern from the data. Both the children and parents found it exciting that this task was genuinely at the cutting edge of human understanding, and that any idea they had stood a chance of making them famous!
The project itself started by describing steps to look at and identify anomalous data, and then take data cleansing steps. After that, it intentionally stopped prescribing analysis steps, encouraging the children to think up and try their own ideas, using an internet search engine to read about those ideas and how they might be implemented in code. I emphasised again that this skill is valuable.
I was pleasantly surprised by the great ideas that some of the students came up with - including removing small amplitudes as a way of removing noise, or only keeping the very peaks of the data as a way to keep "radiation events".
Overall, the more confident and able students really enjoyed working on a data challenge where there was no correct single answer. It was a huge contrast to the tasks they're set at school where there is only one correct answer, and an answer that has been found endlessly before.
The project is online:
Conclusion & Thanks
The motivation behind this touring series of taster workshops was to give children actual experience of using the same tools that are used by professionals across the globe, doing exciting and cutting edge work from AI to data journalism. I also wanted the children to practice some of the methods and discipline from data science, such as visualising data to understand it better, data cleaning, and using different forms of visualisation to gain deeper insights.
A lesson that I learned was that a small number of children didn't follow the prompts to try things themselves or to think about solving some of the puzzles along the way. They were set deliberately because learning happens best when it is done actively rather than passively. I'm not sure there is a good solution to this that can work within the scope of a workshop - attitudes and values to learning come from a broader family environment.
I was really pleased to see some children found the projects genuinely exciting and left wanting to do more ... and I was rather surprised that the parents took as much interest in the projects as the children!
I'd like to thank all the groups that helped make this happen, including the Jupyter project, Numfocus, Carbubian Arts and Science Trust, the Royal Cornwall Museum, the Poly Falmouth, the Krowji Arts Centre and Falmouth University.
