Intro to Data Science, which is going to be taught by Matt Cherrie will be replacing the Introduction to Statistics class in the 2019-2020 school year.
Ventura High School’s math program has offered a class called Intro to Statistics which has recently been taught by Diebolt, but in the next school year, this class will be replaced with Intro to Data Science, which will be taught by Cherrie.
This class will fill the C Math Requirement on the category of Algebra 2. Next year, Cherrie plans to have two class periods where he will teach Intro to Data Science, in classroom 55, which is a computer lab as well. UCLA partnered with six Southern California school districts to introduce the curriculum.
The curriculum for the class was created and inspired UCLA, as they received a 5 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to create a curriculum for high school math and science classes.
Cherrie commented on Data Science, saying, “It’s Science of Data, this information age, data’s all around us, we’re swimming in it, and so I think that to be responsible citizen in this 21st century, you need to be able to interpret data and extend data. The mathematical skills that are involved are mostly statistics…The part that’’ll be new for me is the computer programming and the coding, which will be giving us coding with the data we extract a statistical output, which will explain the results to others.”
One part of the class that was specifically designed was cell phone usage, which is not common in any other classes. Along with the computers, students in the class will be able to use their own cell phones to collect data for their research. For example, Cherrie explained students will use cell phones to help discover a link between stress and socializing.
If this class interests you as a possibility for your schedule, you can find more information with Cherrie in room 55.
