Abstract:

This project is an educational experience held in the Font del Ferro Institute, which has been created with the idea of approaching big data to students of fourth level of secondary school. Currently, students live with big data around, present in all areas of daily life. This data use to be complex, huge, difficult to analize and understand in a traditional way, being their acces limited to few professional entities. Hence, our motivation was to adapt to the classroom, unreachable big data to affordable easy-to-use datasets.

The main goals of this project includes: to promote the treatment and interpretability of big data by the students in the classroom, to teach students to handle non-structured and complex data in a very simple way, to ask questions, to make inferences, to find real world relationships. Furthermore, students can report their observations and results using dynamic mathematics, statistical learning, computational geometry and artificial intelligence methods adapted to secondary school. The project also aims to dynamize the language competence in English, quite important in international scientific projects.

The methodology was based on the development of an environmental research based on the tracking of marine species and their ecological impact. Students have acces to the site http://oceantracks.org. During the project, students had to investigate the following contents: species behavior, species which travel the largest distance globally and daily, places where preys are supposed to be, major density area of each specie in the sea, environmental impact of human beings, among others. Thus, they applied statistical techniques based on intelligent data analysis, knowledge extraction and external related data (maritim traffic, population density close to the area). Students worked in pairs during the initial sessions and in team during the last sessions. Moreover, the guided activities allow students to explore the great potential of the data available and to analize in a broader context the investigation of human impact on the marine environment.

The evaluation of the experience was based on oral presentations and written documents that consisted of summary statistics of the study.

Then, our contribution in this project was to introduce and potentiate in early studies the use of big data affordable for secondary students, in which they share and adapt the new idees to the common curriculum concepts. Furthermore, we aim to promote from different perspectives, the students interaction in science, applied maths, programming and technology.

As a result, we suggest to use big data in secondary school to both guide teachers to bridge new with classical concepts, and to encourage students to find data correlations, to explore data patterns and tendencies, to make inferences, to predict outcomes and future behaviors, to visualize and simulate data while they discover new relationships during the data analysis process. This could be a starting point to explore new strategies for more open and flexible learning environments.

Keywords:

Big Data,, Intelligent Data Analysis, Dynamic Mathematics, Computational Geometry, Artificial Intelligence.