Data Science
MEI Introduction to Data Science short course
MEI has developed a free course to introduce A level Mathematics students to Data Science. The course consists of 8 lessons of short videos and programming tasks (in Python). It is designed to be studied independently and can be completed in the summer term of year 12 or over the summer break between years 12 and 13.
The aim of this course is to give students a greater appreciation of the importance of data science to support them in making informed choices about future study/career options. It also gives students an opportunity to explore the A level Large Data Sets in more detail.
Resources
The course consists of 8 lessons:
- Introduction to Data Science
- Pre-processing and cleaning data
- Cleaning, formatting and grouping data
- Data presentation/visualisation
- Exploring association
- The Data Science cycle
- Introduction to machine learning
- What's next with Data Science
The materials feature activities that use the A level Large Data Sets as a starting point. Throughout the resources there are examples using the data sets for each specification: AQA, Edexcel, OCR, and OCR(MEI).
The activities introduce the use of Python for exploring data but no prior knowledge of programming in Python is expected from students or teachers.
The lessons include Meet a Data Scientist videos featuring practising data scientists talking about their work.
Accessing the course
The course is freely available on this site: Introduction to Data Science Short Course.
These resources were enabled by the Arm School Program.
More information
For more information about MEI's data science work please contact Tom Button, MEI’s Mathematics Technology Specialist.
