Collaboration with SkewTheScript: Spatial STEM Lessons for High Schoolers
This project is a collaboration between the University of Chicago’s Center for Spatial Data Science and an innovative nonprofit, SkewTheScript, to make statistics and math more relevant and engaging for students. Its curriculum is used by over 20,000 high school teachers (reaching 400,000 students), often in Title I schools, but also at UChicago’s UChicago’s Data4All Bridge Workshop. The share of students passing AP Statistics exams has been increasing dramatically in classes using SkewTheScript materials.
We worked with SkewThe Script on a lesson that illustrates sampling methods with spatial data using the case of income segregation and race. We extended this lesson from one city to 100 US cities to make it more relevant to students’ local experiences (see this webinar for details). The next step is to build a web map to automate the sampling calculations that high schoolers currently compute by hand in the paper version and free up time for students to gain a deeper understanding of different sampling methods by exploring them for their city.
Center for Spatial Data Science Partners: Dash Young-Saver (Founder of Skewthescript.org), Nico Marchio (Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation) and Nikhil Patel (Class of ’26).