Two Introductory Data-driven Activities for Secondary Schools

This paper presents two data-driven activities aimed at secondary school students to promote data thinking skills, the first focusing on data literacy and the second on computer programming with a'data-centric' pedagogy. We briefly introduce a Python package, called ToyPandas, that we developed to make coding more accessible to novice data science enthusiasts. The paper then discusses the motivations and challenges of providing an introductory data activity for students without a computing or data science background, and presents our experience, discussing some preliminary assessment results.