Perspectives for data science education at school level – Educational contributions from statistics, computer science and sociocultural studies

University Paderborn (Germany), November 13 to 15, 2017
Location: Waldhotel Nachtigall, Paderborn

Goals of the symposium

Since data science has become more and more relevant in industrial and economic automation processes, marketing processes and monitoring in politics, data science permeates all areas of life. The influence of so-called big data to almost all areas of life raises questions about future possibilities for social participation, self-determination and self-realization in professional and private life and also for the necessary underlying education processes which have to take place at school. The desire of certain authorities and companies to have free access to private data, inevitably comes into conflict with protected personality rights (data protection). The general education at school so far has hardly responded to these specific changes in digitalization. For the teaching of mathematics and computer science completely new challenges have emerged, as well as for the subjects of the socio-scientific field and for cross-curricular media education. All these subjects have to be reinterpreted in regard to the raising attention to data science, to big data and in regard to a fundamentally changing world. In this respect the school has, on the one hand, to realize a broad general education task, but also to stimulate and promote interest in a current, exciting and dynamic new scientific area with numerous applications on the other hand.

In our symposium, we want to take up these issues and discuss the state of the art and future trends of data science that could inspire ideas for teaching data science in secondary schools. This can be for instance ideas and examples from data science, its applications and impacts on society, culture and economy, affordances for adequate professional development initiatives and educational research. We also want to discuss fundamental ideas of data science as they are conceptualized by experts in this field, as a broad perspective of data science as a scientific discipline is needed to inform curriculum development. The symposium will consist of five strands that will explore the topic from various different perspectives mentioned above.

  • Core ideas of data science from the perspective of statistics, computer science, and innovative curriculum projects for data science at school level
  • Data science education at school: Impacts from a sociocultural perspective
  • Data science education at school: Impacts from computer science and computer science education
  • Data science education at school: Impacts from statistics and statistics education
  • Data science education at school: An integrated perspective and synthesis

Schedule of the symposium

Participants of the symposium

Scientific and Organizing team:

Prof. Dr. Rolf Biehler
Lea Budde
Dr. Daniel Frischemeier
Birte Heinemann
Susanne Podworny
Prof. Dr. Carsten Schulte
Dr. Thomas Wassong

The Symposium is initiated and funded by the Deutsche Telekom Stiftung Germany.