Data Science Summer Academy for Chicago Public School Students

Abstract

In this article, we describe DePaul University's summer data science academy for Chicago Public School students which was, in part, funded through the SIGKDD Impact Award program in 2018. The goal of the academy was to increase awareness about data science among high school students. The program specifically aimed to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in computing by targeting economically disadvantaged, African American, Hispanic, and female students. A cohort of 15 high school students from the Chicago Public School system participated in this week-long lab-based data science program learning about a variety of data science methods and their applications, including data visualization, distance-based methods, classification, clustering and others. The group comprised of 75% African American and Hispanic students, 58.3% of whom were female.