Extra support for NPA Data Science
The Short Life Working Group (SLWG), which I previously mentioned, met today to discuss how best to support the new NPA in Data Science. We looked at ways of providing additional support to teachers because of the unique challenges that data science presents to practitioners.
The recently produced materials for NPA Cyber Security have been very well received by teachers and, ideally, we’d like to do something similar for this qualification. But that material was funded by central government, as part of a national cyber resilience initiative, and it’s unlikely similar funds will be available for data science, so we decided on a less ambitious course of action.
We have already commissioned additional assessments (for some of the optional units). We also plan to create an Educator’s Guide (similar to the one produced for NPA Cyber Security), a list of resources than can be used by teachers to deliver the component units, and a couple of case studies about how a school and college delivered the new qualification.
Please contact Emma if you want to know more about the award or can assist in any way.
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More generally, a data scientist is someone who knows how to extract meaning from and interpret data, which requires both tools and methods from statistics and machine learning, as well as being human. She spends a lot of time in the process of collecting, cleaning, and munging data, because data is never clean.