What is DataFace?
Data science is everywhere in the modern world and is increasingly relevant to many careers. Part of Cheltenham Science Festival, and supported by the Jean Golding Institute and CyberFirst, the DataFace project gives secondary school students and their teachers the skills and confidence to dive into an open dataset, find an issue that catches their interest, and tell a story with creative data visualisations. Along with boosting their data literacy and building essential data science skills, DataFace breaks the stereotype that data science is just for those who study IT or computer science.
Why are we involved?
At the JGI, we support and train researchers in data science and develop data literacy skills across all disciplines at the University of Bristol. Through this work, we’ve realised that data literacy is important in every field, not just the traditional “STEM” subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).
The sooner we learn these skills, the sooner we can use them in our daily lives—whether it’s watching the news, understanding finances and cost of living or better understanding our contributions to global warming. This realisation inspired us to look for ways to engage more with the community, which led us to get involved with DataFace.
What did we do?
As part of the project, former JGI director Kate Robson Brown and data scientist James Thomas sat on the project steering group alongside representatives from Cheltenham Festivals and CyberFirst. With assistance from research software engineer Matt Williams they developed teaching resources, including core skills videos for teachers and pupils, dataset explainer videos, and the curated open datasets that the pupils go on to analyse. The JGI also engaged PhD students and postgraduate researchers to act as role models in the videos. These resources have since been expanded with the help of JGI data scientist Huw Day.
What happened at Cheltenham Science Festival?
On Monday, 3 June 2024, teams of students from 12 schools came together for the DataFace competition day. They had an opportunity to share their findings and creative data visualisations in a poster session to their peers, attendees and three judges (including Ask-JGI PhD student Rachael Laidlaw).
Huw Day JGI data scientist, Kate Robson Brown former JGI director, Rachael Laidlaw Ask-JGI PhD student attending Cheltenham Science Festival for the DataFace competition day.
Rather than plot the usual graphs and charts that we’re used to, the students created all manner of visualisations. For example, Gloucester Academy looked at data about the cost of living and made different sized models of food that reflected the buying power between years, with smaller biscuits and sandwiches with a chunk bitten out, reflecting the cost of living rising over time.
The top six schools from the poster sessions were selected by the judges. In the afternoon, they presented their work, sharing their experiences of working on the project and answering questions from the judges.
The winning school was Stroud High School for Girls who visualised data about the environment. They made a bar chart using people to represent the number of threatened species in a country. Each person was holding a papier-mâché balloon – the size of each depicted the emissions by a country per capita.
“The enthusiasm and initiative shown by all students involved in the competition was incredibly inspiring. I especially loved hearing the stories of how each group creatively came up with their project ideas and it was impressive to see the range of skills and resources they’d managed to incorporate into their designs. The room was filled with effective and insightful portrayals of data which each communicated a really important message. The event proved to be a wonderful showcase of just how fruitful the DataFace program has been and it was so rewarding to see the impact of the training videos that I featured in last year!”
Rachael Laidlaw, Ask-JGI PhD student and DataFace Judge
What’s next?
Ready for next year, we’ll be curating more datasets for students to work with and the training materials to go alongside them. We’re excited to work with data that matters to students by creating a new dataset focused on mental health, using information from the World Happiness Report.
Students have different needs, so we’re putting together a more challenging dataset for those who are ready to dig deeper. This dataset will feature mental health data collected over the past decade from countries all over the world. This will give students different options to explore patterns they find interesting. Whether they want to look at lots of countries at one point in time or a few countries over a longer period, they’ll have the freedom to choose how they visualise and analyse the data.
The next big step in data literacy is being able to share your findings with others who might not be familiar with your data, the context, or your analysis methods. That’s why we’re creating a new training video called “how to share your findings”. This video will help students better prepare to share their projects in one-on-one conversations, poster sessions and presentations.