The full Monty on data science for learners

THE Explore Data Science Academy (Edsa) has chalked up another local first with the announcement of an online course and a series of data science competitions aimed at making “job future” skills available to South African high school learners.

The academy made headlines in 2017 when it announced 100 free data science learnerships sponsored by BCX for its 12-month accredited Skills Data Science Programme last year.

These learnerships have increased to 300 this year.

From February 11, scholars between Grades 10 and 12 can access Data Science for High School online. Priced at R249 a month, the 10-month course teaches the fundamentals of data science and exposes students to Python programming, data visualisation and some basic machine-learning algorithms.

“As an academy, we’re concerned that vital future skills are not being taught at our high schools. We’ve also priced the course to make it affordable to as broad a spectrum of scholars as possible,” said Shaun Dippnall, a co-founder of the academy.

“The jobs of the future are very different to today,” Dippnall added. “To succeed in 2025 youngsters will need to be creative problem-solvers who write code and are able to solve complex software algorithms.

“Data Science for High School is intended to do just that. From February 11, learners can begin accessing the course material, which will involve between five and seven hours of selfstudy a week,” Dippnall said.

Although the course is purely online, instruction material is supplemented by videos and assessments to help guide the learner.

Regular testing would show the progress of a learner and provide necessary feedback.

Commenting on the relevance of the course to high school learners, Edsa co-founder Dave Strugnell said: “South Africa’s youth should be learning data science skills from as early an age as possible.

“In many countries these skills have been introduced into the syllabus at primary school level already,” Strugnell added.

In addition to the online course, the academy would be holding two competitions this year, which would involve scholars competing against each other in order to solve complex problems using data science techniques.

Entrance is free.

“These will be Kaggle-style competitions where we give scholars a problem, as well supportive data, and a time period to solve it. Whoever builds the best algorithm wins,” said Aidan Helmbold, another academy co-founder.

The winner will scoop R10 000. The second prize is R5 000 and the third R2 500.

“We’re excited to lead in mobilising a community of South Africa’s youngest and brightest, and to get them solving problems using data science,” said Dippnall.

“We are also excited to market this emerging profession so that our youngsters get to see first-hand how cool data science is, and then have an option to follow a career in this emerging space,” he said.

Find out more about the Data Science for High School course by emailing highschool@explore-ai.net

Enrol at https://www.exploredatascience.net/online-detail?id=1 |