Help the Orange County Girl Scouts support STEM education!

[bhontz]

Girl Scouts of Orange County, in conjuction with CSUF, are hosting their 2nd annual STEM expo on October 15th. I would love to have the Alteryx team host a "data science" table at the conference to offset the code, robotics and raspberry pi tables that I know we have. Let's represent data science!

I'm reaching out through this group for:

• Ideas for a suitable data science oriented "table display" ideas that will be of interest to girls ages 8 - 13
• Volunteers from the Alteryx community, either staff or users, to man a table at the event on the afternoon of October 15th.

I was thinking of a probability distribution with each girl coming to the table rolling dice (or spin a wheel, etc.) and being represented on a distribution. We are expecting 500 girls so there will be plenty of sample. I'm hoping this community can suggest a number of better ideas!!

Thank you in advance!

Brad Hontz

GSOC STEM Expo Committee Co-Chair

[TatianaS]

@SuzanneD

[LaurenU]

This is awesome! As a Gold Scout, I approve, please people volunteer! :) 

Thanks for posting @bhontz

@ToriA and @QuyenT check this out!

[bhontz]

Ideas anyone?!  Hoped to get some help with "ideas" for how to present what "data science" means to girls aged 8 - 13.   Here's another pump priming idea, in the interest of starting a dialog on this issue.

Thinking of displaying a relatively simple tabular data set, meaning maybe 6 fields (rows/cases doesn't really matter) and then asking each table visitor (i.e. Girl Scout) to name a question that could be asked of this set of data to win a prize (candy?).  The more questions they can ask, the more prizes they get.  We'd use Alteryx to show how we'd answer the questions and talk about the role of a data scientist within that scope.  There's lots of public data on fast food nutriution, pet attributes etc. that would be of interest to this age group.   Thoughts?

I know there's some big thinkers out there that can contribute great ideas, thanks in advance for your posts!

[jasonMedina]

Maybe the foodcation analytical app presented by the OC team..fun idea and the interactive app already exists.  Hope this helps stir up ideas and good luck!

[MaureenW]

Brad,

Here is an idea...just throwing it out there.  I have no idea how this showcase works...

What if we had an app that predicted how popular or valuable a kid's toy (take a beenie boo) would be.

We first get the girls to describe features of the toy/ beanie boo that might have impact its value.  

We get them to throw out attributes like:

- in good shape

- no smoking in the home

- the tag is intact

- there were not a lot of them made/they are hard to find

Then we show some correlations to illustrate their impact.

Then, they take a beanie boo from a pile and enter some stuff about it in the app:

- shape it's in, smoking, tag condition, how many are made...maybe we have a bunch they can pick, with some info about them...

the enter it into the app and it generates a result.

We have effectively talked about data, correlation and models.

[bhontz]

I like that one a lot!  After a quick search I noted some beanie baby websites dedicated to sales, selling, pricing (e.g. http://lovemybeanies.com/updated-beanie-babies-price-guide/) and I'll reach out to them to see what sort of history they have and attributes.

I should share another idea that I chased down from a group I found supporting the introduction of data science concepts for youth.  

They didn't exactly have an interactive table display, but more of a small class discussion.  They introduced a "detective work" project to determine how they might be able to predict which children of the same school may be more likely to become ill based on some fabricated data.  They introduced attributes gender, age, geographic location relative to the school (i.e. 3 miles west of the school), and activities that the students participated in.  The data was cooked to illustrate that children that were swimming / swimmers at the school were twice as likely to become ill.   

The "interaction" with the kids came from their interpretation of graphical displays of the individual attributes vs. illness.   Then they were asked to predict how likely a group of new childern entering the school (represented by flashcards) might fare.   I have their presentation deck and short of having a better idea inspired here through this forum (I do like yours btw) I can work with some of the Cal State Fullerton students to see if we can make this into a table display for the Expo.

Thanks Maureen!  Very helpful and appreciate your feedback and the Alteryx community's consideration.

[MaureenW]

while i like the idea of showing how certain attributes can lead to ill health, I'm not a big fan of pointing at swimmers (as a former high school swim team member).  If anything, we want to point to activity as a good thing!  on that same note though, maybe we could get data that shows things like drinking, smoking, not being active, etc. leading to poor health or a lower age.  i bet there'd be info out there around that...and it also serves a way as warning kids against unhealthful habits...?