Computer Science Meets Social Studies: Embedding CS in the Study of Locally Grounded Civic Issues

Data science is an emerging 21st century literacy that promises to support learning in a wide variety of disciplines, from science, to social science, to the humanities. It also provides an engaging context in which to learn computational thinking skills in existing classroom contexts. For my dissertation research, I will explore whether and how data science can support inquiry-based learning in social studies. I conjecture that data science could provide students with an opportunity to use computational thinking to better understand their social world, while also allowing students to draw from and make sense of their own experiences. I plan to explore this idea by enhancing and evaluating a software tool, Local Ground, and creating a curriculum that helps young people identify and describe salient characteristics of their lived realities, moving from unstructured to structured data representations (e.g., photos to tags to databases). This process may generate a rich, motivating data source to explore subsequent ideas in computational thinking and social science.