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Step-by-step instructions for six data literacy activities tested by teens. In this activity guide we present a sampling of data literacy activities created and tested, alongside teen co-designers, during 24 Data Labs held at the Brooklyn Public Library. This guide was last updated in 2026 by Thalia Richter. ...

This document was prepared by Karen Wang, for Pratt Institute's “Data Literacy with, for, and by Youth” project in 2021, updated in 2026 by Thalia Richter. With the active participation of young people, Pratt’s Data Literacy project aims to design, build, and test prototypes for youth-oriented data literacy activities, for use in after-school STEM programs at the public library. The...

The SciAct STEM Ecosystems to Broaden Participation in Authentic STEM Learning: Connecting Subject Matter Experts, Communities, and Learners of All Ages (“SciAct STEM Ecosystems”) project was developed to understand and share practices used by STEM learning ecosystems that support the creation of authentic learning experience to broaden participation in STEM. The summative evaluation focused on understanding how dissemination of project...

This one-shot scenario teaches and demonstrates gameplay for Adventures with Emmy, using 2nd-level characters....

This guide presents the rules for Adventures with Emmy and the hero creation process for players. We also include 6 sample hero sheets to quick-start a game....

VENOMventure is an educational escape game designed by researchers at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum and the UC Museum of Paleontology under an NIH-SEPA award, for children ages 9-13 and their families. The game aims to improve players’ understanding of evolutionary trees and boost interest in biomedical science and careers through a fun and immersive experience. VENOMventure traveled...

This report summarizes the effectiveness of the Understanding Evolution and Understanding Science website modernization project, funded by IMLS award no. MA-10-19-0539-19. To assess these goals, we conducted several online surveys of website users. We conducted baseline satisfaction surveys of site users before upgrading the sites, and then repeated these surveys after upgrades to gauge the project’s impact on satisfaction. We...

Escape rooms are an engaging and increasingly popular game format in which a team is “locked” in a room and challenged to solve a series of narrative-embedded puzzles encoded in the room’s artifacts in order to “escape” within a set period of time. The University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) and partners University of Kansas Natural History Museum (KUNHM)...

In this paper, we explored data reasoning in a data science learning program that bridged data visualization and art creation. After deductive qualitative analysis of the transcripts of the interviews with the program participants, we found data visualization played a pivotal role in data reasoning....

The current data science education requires educators to provide more personally meaningful and culturally relevant data science learning experiences. By incorporating art production, we designed a data-art inquiry program to teach students data science basics and enable them to use art techniques to visualize their data. To understand how students established connections between data and art, we employed epistemic network...

This study aims to investigate the design considerations and tensions in developing data visualization activities that integrate multi-disciplinary, critical, and community-centered approaches to data learning. We do so through conjecture mapping and qualitative analysis in the context of a design-based research study of an informal education program focused on data visualization. We found multiple design considerations tied to each approach,...

Data visualization reimagining can be an effective way for students to develop a deep understanding of a given data visualization. It encompasses three different dimensions: reformatting, reframing, and renarrating. In this study, we explored the role of renarrating in a data reimagining activity. With semi-structured interviews, we found that renarrating can support reformatting and reframing by providing a concrete context...

This poster proposal focuses on entry points as a lens for analyzing learning in community learning events (CLEs), which involve youth ‘data artists’ and community members. Thematic analysis of qualitative data is used to understand how entry points influence learning at CLEs and inform future iterations of the current project. Early analysis shows three emergent themes: geography and physicality; relationality,...

This study presents analysis of an episode about the sensemaking among facilitators and a researcher-designer about youth’s learning of artistic data visualization in an informal education program. With micro-analysis of discourse, it explores the framing and interpretation participants use about youth, the scope of framing, and themes when re-framing occurs. The findings speak to the dynamic nature of the resources...

This poster shows how middle schoolers in an afterschool data-art inquiry program connect data and art....

In the recent K-12 educational literature, arts-based data visualization has been positioned as a compelling means of rendering data science and statistical learning accessible, motivating, and empowering for youth, as data users and producers. However, the only research to attend carefully to youth’s data-based, artistic storytelling practices has been limited in scope to specific storytelling mechanisms, like youth’s metaphor usage....

Air pollution poses critical health and environmental risks, yet public communication of air quality data is typically reduced to a single Air Quality Index (AQI) value that obscures underlying complexity. Existing visualization tools reinforce this oversimplification, leaving key AQI messages unaddressed. This paper presents ContAQT, an interactive platform that helps public audiences explore multi-pollutant air quality data in informal learning...

In this paper, we introduce a tangible interaction activity we created using colored candies as a model to explain both the Air Quality Index (AQI) and foundational data visualization design concepts. This activity is a part of a two-week Data Visualization and the Environment (DVE) summer camp for middle school students. DVE students spend one week learning the basics of...

Data visualization literacy is essential for K-12 students, yet existing practices emphasize interpreting pre-made visualizations rather than creating them. To address this, we developed the DPV (Domain, Purpose, Visual) framework, which guides middle school students through the visualization design process. The framework simplifies design into three stages: understanding the problem domain, specifying the communication purpose, and translating data into effective...

We designed a two-week summer camp to support Preparation for Future Learning (PFL) in data literacy by fostering both skills and dispositions. Middle schoolers create data visualization stories to address community-related issues they identified. Analysis showed growth in data visualization skills, self-efficacy, and recognition of data visualization’s value. We observed frequent student decision-making, suggesting agency as a key factor. This...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore teen-adult dialogic interactions during the co-design of data literacy activities in order to determine the nature of teen thinking, their emotions, level of engagement, and the power of relationships between teens and adults in the context of data literacy. This study conceives of co-design as a learning space for data literacy. It...

This paper reports on research that asks, “How might Youth Data Literacy be supported through informal, after-school activities at the library?” The goal of the project is to build a youth-oriented model of data literacy which incorporates social-awareness, critical approaches, and “goodness of fit” into informal STEM learning about data. To this end, the project has been working with teen...

Presents research investigating youth data literacy at the public library. The Data Literacy with, for, and by Youth project is framed by principles of participatory design, and asks, how might an informal STEM learning environment such as the public library, support the development of the skills, knowledge, and dispositions that young people need for them to take charge of their...

This report presents the final summative evaluation of Collaborative Research: The Notion of Failure and Maker Programming for Youth: Supporting the Professional Development, Reflection, and Learning of Informal Educators, funded by the National Science Foundation through the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program. The evaluation was conducted by Monika Mayer, the project’s external evaluator. The report examines the development, implementation,...

This resource is intended to support people planning visitor studies in thinking through the successful implementation of context-sensitive data collection. The core of the workbook is a series of "weigh stations" to help you reflect on our suggested considerations for study planning: the Utility of different methods for responding to your needs, the Capacity needed to carry out the study,...