The vision

Data science is everywhere in the modern world and is increasingly relevant to many careers. The sooner young people learn data literacy skills, the sooner they can use them in their daily lives—whether it's watching the news, understanding finances and cost of living or better understanding our contributions to global warming.

Cheltenham Festivals, the Jean Golding Institute and CyberFirst have together created the DataFace project. Part of Cheltenham Science Festival, DataFace provides teaching resources for secondary school pupils and their teachers. It aims to give them 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.

Activities

Members of the Jean Golding Institute collaborated by serving on the DataFace project steering group, developing teaching resources (including core skills videos and dataset explainer videos for teachers and pupils), and curating 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 and on competition judging panels.

About Cheltenham Festivals

Cheltenham Festivals is a charity that produces inclusive festivals and projects focusing on music, science, and the spoken and written word. Their mission leads them to respond to specific societal concerns including: the cybertech skills gap, the climate crisis, low reading for pleasure among children, the mental health crisis, inequity of music provision, supporting low-income households in Cheltenham and the opportunity for marginalised groups.

Among their other projects is FameLab, a science communication competition and training programme that has been run in over 30 countries across the world, with more than 200 local partner organisations. It has brought together over 40,000 scientists and engineers who are able to engage with international audiences.