Open Data Visualization in Danish Schools: A case Study

Abstract

Increasingly public bodies and organizations are publishing Open Data for citizens to improve their quality of life and solving public problems. But having Open Data available is not enough. Public engagement is also important for successful Open Data initiatives. There is an increasing demand for strategies to actively involve the public exploiting Open Data, where not only the citizens but also school pupils and young people are able to explore, understand and extract useful information from the data, grasp the meaning of the information, and to visually represent findings. In this research paper, we investigate how we can equip our younger generation with the essential future skills using Open Data as part of their learning activities in public schools. We present the results of a survey among Danish school teachers and pupils. The survey focuses on how we can introduce Open Data visualizations in schools, and what are the possible benefits and challenges for pupils and teachers to use Open Data in their everyday teaching environment. We briefly review Copenhagen city's Open Data and existing open source software suitable for visualization, to study which open source software pupils can easily adapt to visualize Open Data and which data-sets teachers can relate to their teaching themes. Our study shows that introducing Open Data visualizations in schools make everyday teaching interesting and help improving pupils learning skills and that to actively use Open Data visualizations in schools, teachers and pupils need to boost their digital skills.

Enterprise Architecture Oriented Requirements Engineering for the Design of a School Friendly Open Data Web Interface

“…We also surveyed ten Danish public schools to understand teacher and student perspectives in Open Data usage. This work is discussed in [8] and [30]. Teachers were very positive about the potential to facilitate teaching with actual data, but they required ready-to-use datasets and visualizations as part of teaching assignments.…”

“…The pupils learned about home energy consumption and the generation of solar energy from home solar photovoltaic (PV) technology, by interpreting existing visualizations of smart meter data and data obtained from an aerial survey. Saddiqa et al [8] presented survey results of Open Data visualization in Danish public schools. The authors conducted interviews and set up pilot tests to introduce and investigate the scope of Open Data visualizations in elementary schools for fifth grade and above.…”

“…In our study, to derive the enterprise architecture models, the requirements were identified through interviews with Danish public-school teachers, pilot tests, and observations with pupils, where the setup and participant details are given in [8] and [30]. Using EAORE, we explored and investigated the requirements of the Open Data interface for schools.…”

“…For instance, as part of a chemistry class, pollution levels, noise levels, and water quality datasets can provide up-to-date knowledge about local areas. Pupils can further discuss why the levels are high or low, and how they could work to improve the situation [8]. Open datasets can be used as educational resources to support teaching of a wide variety of subjects and to permit pupils to work with the actual datasets to develop new learning skills.…”

Enterprise Architecture Oriented Requirements Engineering for Open Data Usage in Schools

“…For instance, pollution level, noise level and water quality data-sets can provide the current situation of local areas as part of chemistry subject. Students can further discuss why the levels are high or low, and how they could improve the situation [7]. Open data-sets can also be used as educational resources, to support different other teaching subjects, and permit students to work with the actual data-sets and to develop new learning skills [11].…”