By Tiffany Whitfield

Old Dominion University's Department of Computer Science hosted a Data Science Summer Camp for area high school students sponsored by PRA Group, Inc. The camp was led by Sampath Jayarathna, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. This 10-day intensive program on the emerging field of data science was held from August 9 through August 20, 2021, and 14 Norfolk high school students participated. The program was hybrid with onsite learning as well as virtual training sessions.

Data Science is an emerging field and Jayarathna long with graduate students from ODU's Computer Science Department immersed students in programming, coding and problem solving. The high school students learned Python programming, which is currently the most popular programming language for Data Science.

The summer program was designed to prepare high school students to work with different data sources. "During each session, we gave the students some activities to work on based on the topics covered since the training is more hands-on than theoretical," said Jayarathna.

"Data Science is becoming the lingua franca of the 21st century as there are more data sources today than ever before," said Jayarathna. "We must prepare the younger generation for the world of data science and artificial intelligence."

The summer camp can advance that effort thanks to the support of its sponsors. Coding, data analytics and machine learning are critical tools in today's world. PRA Group aims to help students build robust foundations not only for their own success, but also for that of the people and communities they will impact in the future through innovation and discovery. As such, PRA is proud to support Old Dominion University's Data Science Camp in making these skills accessible to high school students throughout Hampton Roads.

"It was amazing how the students were still able to grasp these high-level concepts via online meetings as evident in their engagements in the class activities," said Jayarathna. They began the virtual class with a fundamental data science library named pandas. Pandas is a Python data analysis software popularly used by most data scientists and data analysts for manipulating and analyzing structured data.

The various concepts that the students were introduced to were data visualization, data wrangling, data cleaning and machine learning. Workshop instructors included graduate students from the Department of Computer Science, Himarsha Jayanetti, Kehinde Ajayi and Kritika Garg.

Presentations were given to the high school students by ODU faculty, alumni, and data scientists and engineers. Jian Wu, Ph.D. ODU assistant professor in Computer Science and member of the Web Science and Digital Libraries Group (WS-DL), talked to the students about natural language processing and "Training Computers to Understand Humans." Dr. Meghan Chandarana, a computer engineer at NASA Ames Research Center, discussed her journey of becoming a NASA engineer. Dr. Sawood Alam, an ODU alumnus of the WS-DL group, shared his experiences as a web and data scientist at Internet Archive.

In addition to the lectures, students teamed up to work on projects using the Google Collab environment. Students chose from a list of 15 topics and datasets to design a final project. They applied their coding and data science skills acquired during the camp to experiment with the chosen data. On the final day of the camp, nine student teams presented their projects.

The following is the list of the final projects:

Students enjoyed creating data visualizations such as using bar plots to show the view count of trending YouTube channels and COVID-19 cases per county. Some students even used advanced concepts like text analysis and Web scraping.

"It was impressive to see the development in coding skills and confidence of these high school students," said Jayarathna. Some students went from writing their first "hello world" program in Python to experimenting with datasets and creating visualizations.

To learn more about ODU's Computer Science Data Science program click here.