Pre-session jitters and apprehensions - Mentor story by Vishal

It was fun working with kids. Teaching them about data science was expected to be fairly difficult task. But it really awesome to see the level  of children and how quickly they could grasp concepts. But at the same time I felt a few weak kids being left behind and were hesitant to raise doubts. Here I guess having a mentor to whom they could ask their doubts had helped a lot.  

In this camp it was interesting to see how I could make kids interact with me. So I tried to ask them their interests and tell them how they could use data science in their field of interest which was sports in my kid's case.  

I felt that little more time should be spent on teaching excel  so that they could try out new things with the data, maybe try out other visualizations and see if they were more intuitive.  I could see that they had no experience with Excel. Initially I wasn’t even sure if I should teach them about filters. But they could grasp it quickly and use it.

In the data that we were analysing all bins had almost same amount of data but slightly more on the lower side given the rubric. When I asked what could be deduced about this kid from the graphs they said looks like the kid is confused and doesn’t want to make a lot of friends.

What I had to specifically take care was that I don’t use jargon and keep it as simple as possible because that would make them stop understanding stuff and simply lose interest. Before this session also I feared that if not done properly children might lose interest in this completely and have a bias against it throughout their lives. Through the end we could see that children were pretty happy and were not bored.

Another interesting thing that I noted while the kids were writing the blog at the end was they were discussing what they had done through the experiment and what was the inference from it. So making them write about what they understood or their experience was a good choice.