APPLICATION Will Open Early 2025

Workshop Overview

The week will include sessions on defining data science, learning data science content, understanding how data science can fit into your schools curriculum and requirements, and getting familiar with popular data science tools used in education. You can expect the sessions to be interactive and hands-on. Some sessions may ask you to get outside and collect data (weather permitting!), and then come back in the classroom to practice using your newly acquired data science skills.

Application Details

We can only serve 75 attendees for this workshop. Instead of utilizing a "first come first serve" registration system for this event, an application will be utilized to select participants from varying types of schools, subject areas, and experience levels. Since part of the mission of NCSSM is to advance public education in North Carolina, applicants from North Carolina will receive priority selection to attend. We still strongly encourage applications from out of state applicants who wish to attend, and will accept as many as we can as allowed by funding and space. In previous years we've had many participants attend from outside of North Carolina!

Expected Application Timeline (Subject to change)

• Application opens: Monday, February 3rd, 2025

• Priority deadline: Monday, March 3rd, 2025

• Notification to priority applicants: Monday, March 17th, 2025

• Rolling acceptances and notifications until participant cap is reached

Funding for Travel/Lodging Available

Thanks to generous support from Google.org, limited travel funding is available for applicants selected to attend. 

• Folks attending from outside of North Carolina, or equivalent distance that makes driving to Morganton, NC impractical. You can apply for funding to cover your costs of travel (airfare) and lodging at our partner hotels. 

• Folks who live within driving distance of NCSSM-Morganton, but far enough away to make daily commuting impractical. You can apply for funding to cover the costs of driving to our campus from your home and lodging at our partner hotels.

• Folks who live under a 45 minute drive from NCSSM-Morganton. Sorry, you are not eligible for travel or lodging funding. Please plan to drive to campus each day, or you're welcome to book lodging in our hotel blocks using personal funds.

We ask that participants who work at a school with funds devoted for professional development do their best to utilize school funds to cover travel and lodging whenever possible. This allows us to maximize our funding for those teachers who don't have access to professional development funds at their schools.

Two Groups for Different experience levels

We're excited to offer two ability tracks for our participants! 

Novice Group (limited to 55 participants)

For teachers who are completely new or still getting started in teaching data science, we suggest signing up for the "Novice" track. This group will obtain an overview of data science at the middle/high-school level, cover the basics of data collection and wrangling, hypothesis testing through simulation, and making predictions from data. Additionally, attendees will learn about a variety of tools to use in their classroom, with a focus on using Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) and spreadsheets.

Experienced Group (limited to 20 participants)

For teachers who have been to the workshop in the past, or are looking to dig into more of the nitty gritty of data science coursework should sign up for the "Experienced" track. Attendees will learn how to utilizing programming tools, like Python and R, to implement data science activities with their students. Experienced participants will have a few specialized sessions from outside presenters to learn how data science is used in specific governmental, research and industry applications.