 Hello, my amazing math minds and welcome to this week's math tip Monday. My name is Heidi Rethmeyer. So this week I want to talk a little bit about a field called data science. So we'll take a moment to talk about what it is, why it's important and how you can incorporate data science in your classroom. So first of all, what is data science. So there's a lot of statistics out there about the amount of data that our world is generating on a daily basis, which is really quite mind blowing. So there is a field an ever growing field of data science. So data science I would consider really overlapping of several different areas, one would be obviously math and statistics. And then computer science and coding, taking that data and manipulating it. And then also, what sort of domain are we working in, in terms of this data, and that domain could be business, it could be sports, if you're familiar with the movie Moneyball, then that was all about data science. The education agriculture, medical, we're seeing a lot of data right now as well in the medical field with our COVID crisis. But the overlapping of those three areas is where we would find data science. So what is it. Well, again, our world is generating massive amounts of data and oftentimes sets of data are maybe given to someone and say, what is this telling us. Oftentimes a data scientist will just start by asking questions. How does one particular variable impact another one. You look for patterns, and then ultimately try to make meaning of the data, and then communicate that data which is often done in the form of infographics. So I recently listened to a podcast for economics, some of you may be familiar with that, where they took a survey, which turned out to be mostly professional men, but they took a survey of their daily use or never use of particular math topics. And we can see the traditional topics that we see in high school math of algebra geometry trig and calculus were fairly low on the daily use, whereas there was a very high daily use involving data whether it's visualizing data analyzing and interpreting it, accessing database using spreadsheets. Joe bowler who is a professor at Stanford and the mathematics education department did a similar one of, I believe it was about 300 professionals in the educational field. In this case, most of them were female, and they found very similar results. So, not to say that the traditional path is necessarily not working for us though I think we're really missing the boat if we're not taking the time to address data and addressing data literacy for our students. So how can you incorporate data science. I've uploaded several links here to help with that. If you're familiar with number talks. There are also data talks, which is on the you could you cubed website which was created also by Joe bowler. And then some data science tasks and I'll take you and show you a couple of those. The data talks I would say are from anywhere from kindergarten through high school, the data science tasks I would consider more of a middle school to high school. And then James also has a site of what's going on in this graph again I would consider those mostly a secondary, and then I have a couple other links there for you. So I just want to show you some examples. So here is one from you cubed that I would consider something that you could use kindergarten clear up through high school if you wished, and pretty much they all start with the questions of what do you notice and what do you wonder. And this is a great way for kids just to start asking questions about the data that they're seeing. And so this one obviously has to do with the washing of hands so I thought that was a pretty relevant one. Okay, and so there's some information to help you as well. So this would be a good one to start. And one also on the New York Times website. In this case, it is common injuries for boys among popular high school sports. So again you can just start the conversation about what do you notice what do you wonder, start asking questions. And that's really how this data is often produced in an infographic format. And so it's really important that we have students be critical consumers of the data and ask questions about the data that they're looking at. So that is this week's math tip Monday, think about incorporating data science in your classes. And until next time, stay well, be kind.