Methods of Engaging Teens in Conversations about Personal Digital Data: Public Library Context

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 co-designers to build and test a range of data literacy activities that, according to teens, would be both meaningful, fun, and worth their time in a voluntary, drop-in setting like the library. In this paper, we present a preliminary inventory of the data literacy activities created and tested alongside two teams of teen co-designers in 14 Data Labs during the Spring and Fall of 2021, to be used as a tool to support future designers of data literacy activities at the library.