Hey,
I was a guest instructor for a local after school program called "Creative
Computing", which introduces coding to kids aged 7-12. The purpose of the
guest instructors was to demonstrate how coding is used in different jobs
and for different purposes. I focused on how it's used in marine biology to
learn about what species there are and where they can be found. The
activity was less about learning how to code, specifically (although the
after school program itself focused on that), and more about applications
of coding, but I think that's equally as important when trying to get kids
interested!
We started by talking about "What are data?" and looked at a data set about
sharks (because what kid doesn't love sharks, especially right after Shark
Week?!). I explained that each row was a record of one shark being caught,
and the record contained information about the species, the season it was
caught in, and the depth where it was caught. We started by looking at the
first 10 rows up on a screen, and I had them answering questions like "How
many species of sharks did we catch?", and "What species was the most
common?" by just counting up the records out loud. Then we looked at the
first 25 rows, the first 100, etc., and talked about how much harder it is
to try to count by hand when there's so many records. I revealed to them
that there are actually over a million records and we brainstormed about
how long it would take a whole roomful of people to count the rows ("What
if you made a mistake?", "What if you lost count?"). We all agreed that
using code to tell a computer to count them for us would save a lot of
time. We learned some simple R code, table(), and used it to count the
number of times that each species was recorded, and the number of times
that each species was recorded in each season.
Then we talked about shark conservation, and decided that an important
thing that we would need to know in order to protect a species is "Where
does the species live?" (simply in terms of depth). We used some
fill-in-the-blank ggplot code to overlay points representing depth over a
pre-existing plot containing a cartoon cross-section of the ocean (boat
floating on top, seaweed at the bottom, ranging from shallow to deep ocean
zones). The kids had a chance to try filling in the code using different
species at different times of the year ("Where do we find smooth dogfish
sharks in the summer?"). We talked about how visualizing data is useful,
and how our plots could help us protect each species ("No fishing in the
shallow water in the spring!").
It was a ton of fun and well recieved by the kids and the program lead! I
love hearing about kid-friendly coding activities that members of the
Carpentries community have done; I'd love to see this thread continue :)
Danielle
--
PhD Student, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Instructor, Software Carpentry
Instructor Trainer, Software Carpentry
Board of Directors, Females in the Natural Sciences Canada
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