Bio

Rory Foulger is a data science, AI and statistics student at Minerva Schools at KGI, and is a member of Minerva’s first graduating class. Rory is passionate about radical education, society and data science, and is interested in dissecting how societies work from multiple angles. Rory’s interests are in curriculum development, community building and empowering youth to manifest themselves in working with young children, teenagers, students and adults in the workplace to work out what people need to learn and how best to help them learn it. Raised in the United Kingdom, Rory has lived in eight countries since they finished high school, as far-flung as Argentina and South Korea, and as familiar as Germany and the USA. Rory loves to travel and soak up local cultures, as well as actively participate in working to solve problems in these countries or for local businesses.

Computational Essay

Shortest Path Problems in the Wolfram Language »

Project: Developing Computational Thinking: A Curriculum for Survey Design and Analysis

Goal

The goal of this project is to build an interactive project for middle-school-aged students to use that leads them through the design, implementation and analysis of a survey. Students will be able to write questions and collect responses, and then their data will be used to create an interactive series of graphs and descriptive statistics. The overall goal is to explain and demonstrate survey design and analysis, teaching statistics and scientific method alongside developing computational thinking for middle-school and lower-high-school students.

Main Results in Detail

The final product of this project is a teacher resource for the Wolfram Foundation’s Computational Thinking Initiatives. This is an interactive, computational lesson plan for teachers to use with a class. The lesson plan takes students through creating new questions using code, creating hypotheses, experimenting with different types of plots for different types of data, working out what it means to be a good data visualization and creating a notebook with their best visualizations, giving evidence for and against their hypotheses.

Future Work

On the technical side, the plan is to add the function to the Function Repository so that it’s more accessible. I would like to be able to include more than one dataset on each graph so that students can compare within the tab and to include scatter graphs between two datasets to help start conversations on correlation. Also, I would like to create similar lesson plans at different levels, this one and one for high schoolers including correlations, and more rigorous hypothesis testing. The plan is to contact middle-school teachers and help them implement the lesson plan with their class.