In this article I wanted
to share my journey with helping kids to get know about data and how to visualize
data so that it makes more sense.
How did it all start ?
In June 2016, I signed
up as a mentor for #jhackNZ. 2016 Game Development Competition for high school
kids. This competition was targeted for
high school kids.
JHACK in partnership
with Microsoft ran their
first workshop on 26th June 2016. Over 100 kids were trained for
half a day on a game development software called Construct 2.
They were given 6 weeks
to develop games and submit. All the
mentors that signed up also were trained on Construct 2. After the training, when I was returning home
from the event, a thought came up – “Why not I teach some of the primary school
kids that come to the Sunday school.’
This idea was put into
practice on July 11th, with the start of the school holidays. I
chose about 12 kids who come to the Sunday School between the age of 9 to 12
years and started teaching them the software Construct 2 that I learned in 2
hours. I planned a 6 weeks course at that
time.
I mentioned this to the Program
Manager of #JHacknz after 2 weeks of successfully running the course. She encouraged me and said “Why don’t the
kids submit some games for the competition?”
This motivated me to encourage kids to build some games that they would
like to build. And on September 16th
8 individual games and 1 group game were successfully submitted.
On 25th
September all the kids and parents joined the other high school kids who have
submitted games for the competition. It
was full day of fun and activity for the kids with industry experts and the
final 5 games were selected for individual category and 5 games were selected
for group games category. The kids whose games were selected had to present to
all the audience about their games
We were thrilled to hear
that 2 of our kids games made to the finals.
You can have a look at them presenting
So after their
presentations in the final round, we were once again pleased to hear that these
two games got 2nd and third prizes in the individual category. I couldn’t believe this and this was a
significant achievement for all of us.
You can check the photos here.
So what’s next ?
After the success of the
game development course, I thought I should spend some time teaching kids about
technology. So I was thinking of what to
teach them and came up with a lot of ideas and finally settled with -- why not
teach them with what I have been doing for the last 15 years ?
I planned a 12 week
course on Databases
and Data visualisations and started my
first class on July 10th 2018 In the databases section of the class, I
taught them fundamentals of SQL using Microsoft SQL Server Express using SQL
Server Management Studio.
I have posted a detailed description of what happened in each week in my blog posts –
I have posted a detailed description of what happened in each week in my blog posts –
This was planned to be
delivered in the first 6 weeks. At the
end of the 6 weeks, I conducted a test
in SQL to gauge whether the kids have understood what I was trying to teach
them. The results of the test was very
good as described
here.
I started off Week
7 with the Data Visualisations classes that are mainly focused on Power BI. I taught the basic concepts of Power BI as
below:
· Getting Data into Power BI,
· Power Query,
· Creating a column,
· Creating a measure and what is the difference between
these two
· Simple SUM and Count in DAX
· Creating bookmarks
· Creating data visualisations
At the end of the full 12 weeks course, I have conducted a Power BI competition for all the kids. I have given them the link to the Makeovermonday datasets and asked them to pick their datasets that interests them and do an analysis from these for the competition.
The judges for this
competition were the two renowned Microsoft MVPs Reza Rad and Leila Etaati
The details of this
competition are in this link
here
What did I learn from teaching kids about data
?
Below are some of the learnings from this journey
So What Happened Next ?
This year I have started the same course "Free Databases and Data Visualisations" for 9 to 13 year old kids. Updates can be obtained on my blog from here
Also the season 1 kids
have submitted 4 visualisations for the #Backtoschool competition held by
Microsoft. The details of all the 4
submissions are below:
Climate News
|
Story of
Historical Events
Career
Pathways
Road Safety
|
