idem

The everyday use of digital technologies is creating vast reservoirs of data. This data has huge, but largely untapped, potential. It could be used to transform public services, promote sustainability and enhance quality of life. Corporate capacity to understand data has become so central to competitive advantage that ‘big data’ has been termed ‘the ‘new oil’ that will fuel our economy in the coming decades’. But it is useless if we don’t have the skills and creativity to turn it into insight and action. SPIDAS brought together three research-intensive universities, the UK Met Office and nine schools/colleges in the UK, Turkey and Catalonia-Spain together to innovate and extend best practice in the teaching of data analytics though student-centred, problem-based learning, focusing on the impacts of weather and climate change. The project began with a thorough examination of existing practice and its context in each member state, published in the form of a State-of-the-Art Review. We then build on this, designing a series of pilot projects, to be delivered by each SPIDAS partner school, setting out the learning objectives, the data analyses skills to be acquired, the characteristics of the proposed learning activities and ICT tools to be used in each pilot. We then gathered the lessons from this and created our Toolkit which includes examples of each pilot and data and techniques designed to help schools teach data analytics. The new Toolkit is here: https://spidasproject.org.uk/ In this project we successfully innovated and extended best practice in the teaching of data analytics though student-centred, problem-based learning, focusing on the impacts of weather and climate change. Our project highlighted the way weather and climate connects students and communities across Europe. Understanding climate change, weather, its unpredictability and impacts is one of the greatest data challenge of our time and one of the deepest concerns of young people across Europe. In the project the researchers from three counties (Turkey, Spain and UK) worked with their local school teachers and students to understand how we can respond to these challenges in a collaborative project takes account of differences in our educational systems; builds on our best practice; and draws together and disseminates lessons at the European level. Through Stakeholder engagement and partners responsibilities for teacher training and creating research impact, project results have been mainstreamed into partner schools ongoing practice and especially to inform the content of initial and in-service teacher training delivered by our University partners; they have also been shared with others schools, teacher educators and policymakers in each participating region; to boost the teaching and learning of data analytics.