CS + X Professional Development Day with Chicago Public Schools at Google Chicago

On Monday, March 31, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider and Karle Flanagan spent the day in Chicago for the second annual event in collaboration with the Discovery Partners Institute (DPI) and Chicago Public Schools (CPS), a CS + X professional development day focused on Data Science with CPS educators.

Google donated meeting space in their downtown building to host Fagen-Ulmschneider, a Siebel School of Computing and Data Science CS professor at The Grainger College of Engineering, and Flanagan, a professor from the Department of Statistics in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. Approximately 60 teachers from across CPS attended to, as Fagen-Ulmschneider puts it, "nerd out" with CS + X and data science. The group explored the Data Science DISCOVERY web resource, participated in live data science demos, and worked through the micro project "Trends in High School GPAs."

The Data Science projects and resources provided as part of the DISCOVERY web resource by the University of Illinois are free and accessible to anyone online at any time. DISCOVERY includes hundreds of data science lessons, guides, and a new data science project every week, allowing anyone to interact with the very best data science content available online. Several high school teachers will pilot using the Data Science MicroProjects as a post-AP exam resource to deepen their data science skills after completing their AP exams later in spring 2025.

Flanagan says "It was such an honor to be in a room with so many people who are passionate about teaching! The teachers were actively engaged in the MicroProject and many of them talked to us about how they plan to use what we have created in their classrooms. Being able to expand Data Science beyond the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is something Wade and I are super passionate about, so this opportunity was very exciting!"

In addition to the session led by Flanagan and  Fagen-Ulmschneider, the teachers also heard from a panel working in the Chicago tech industry, learned about resources from the Discovery Partners Institute (DPI) and World Business Chicago, and had breakout sessions with Google and other speakers.