Thank you for your comments, Amy. The NPR project is fantastic, in part because it gives a glimpse of the most effective techniques of data visualization. We'll need to talk to the PIs!

So far, according to feedback from club facilitators, students have really enjoyed the story. For some, the reading level has been a challenge (it's nominally around 4th grade, but there is a lot of new vocabulary). Some program leaders, especially for ELL students, read aloud. We get some feedback about favorite and unfavorite chapters--visiting Congo, France and Taiwan have been hits, colonial Boston not so much.

Our early findings come from pilots at the Boston Museum of Science and a summer program at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics. Kids who responded to the surveys reported becoming less anxious about COVID, more confident of their ability to look at data and graphs, more interested in topics from virology to epidemiology to data science, and interested in doing more science book clubs. But this was a self-selected sample, many of them with parents in the sciences, so we are ramping up to look at similar questions with our respondents from afterschool clubs with 4H, Girls Inc., the Y, and Boys and Girls Clubs.

As for connecting kids with people working in the field, we have advisors and volunteers to meet with them, but if any readers work with data or epidemiology and would like to offer ten minutes every once in a while to meet with eager learners, please get in touch!

I'll add too that career connections is a key component of each club, which each have 2 brief virtual visits from people working in fields like public health, medicine, epidemiology, and data science. Each club finds one person working in the club's region, and the project provides another visitor, often from our partner the Jackson Laboratory. These are fairly informal visits--the person briefly describes what they do, how they got interested in it, and then there's time for Q&A/discussion with the kids. I am now beginning to organize the career connections visits for the summer clubs (late June to late August). If anyone is interested in volunteering, please shoot me a quick email. (jsagrans@scieds.com). It can be a fun, rewarding experience, and does not take a lot of time (15 minutes or so for a visit). Thanks!

Also, here is some more detail from what we found in the two pilots (again, this is a relatively small/self-selected sample at this point, but we should have more data from a broader range of youth by the end of the summer):

Post-club surveys from youth who participated show: 74% became more interested in COVID-19 as a result of their experience; 48% became less anxious about the pandemic (while none became more anxious); and 65% became more confident in their ability to use and interpret graphs. Moreover, their interest in STEM careers grew, with 39% becoming more interested in immunology, 39% in data science, 30% in teaching about disease data, 30% in epidemiology, 22% in virology, and 17% in health policy advising. Our observational notes show that youth quickly grasped the basic concept of rate when it was placed in the context of “fair comparisons.” For example, they immediately understood that numbers of infections do not tell the whole story when we asked them to compare Maine vs. California.

To both Jacob and Pendred, 

Thank you for your responses. The early results (though self-selecting as you said) are so encouraging! And I am not surprised. In my own work teaching quantitative reasoning skills I always felt like there was this huge gap between reasoning ability in an applied, consequential context and in the abstract, so something like computing the cost of materials for a home project would be easy if a student were standing in Home Depot but difficult if encountered in a text. So having students think about COIVD which has so profoundly impacted their lives opens up this amazing possibility for them to really see data working in a way that makes sense and is consequential for their lives.

And Pendre, I love how you are honestly assessing which chapters are working most effectively. Are you planning to revise in light of these reader responses?

And to both - so wonderful that you are using this platform to hopefully find some volunteers! Connecting kids with real scientists and people working with data in the field is just a tremendous thing to do.

I haven't yet acted to remove colonial Boston, because I love the story of how smallpox variolation came to the US, brought by an enslaved African. But maybe after more feedback I will! Mostly I have focused on revisions and new chapters to keep up with the pandemic--vaccines and variants. The other challenge is making the data-focused activities active and interactive.

George, I will also reply privately, but the general answer is that although our current scale-up is happening through Imagine Science with underserved populations, soon everyone will have access to the materials. The second edition of the book will soon be back up on Amazon or can be pre-ordered through www.tumblehomebooks.org, and the program facilitator's guide will soon be freely available. Club leaders can talk to Jan and me, and we will happily share and advise.

Hi George,

It's good to hear from you and as Penny said, the book is available to all.  We'd love to expand to more youth through programs at the Y, 4-H, Girls Inc, or Boys and Girls Clubs, but we are just getting started!  Stay in touch and we'll keep you updated as the project expands

Thank you, Pei. We will make sure you hear about what we learn!

Pei, let me add that one of our implicit goals is to help kids learn about other parts of the world.  The protagonists visit DCR, Bangladesh, France, and Taiwan (among others).  Much of the data we work with comes from international sources, and we encourage kids to examine data from other countries.  We agree that international collaboration is critical, especially now!

We do hope to make certain health-related professions like epidemiology or data science more visible to students, so they can think about ways to serve the public beyond becoming a doctor.

Hi Jennifer,

At the moment we are disseminating through Imagine Science (https://imaginesci.org/), which is a collaborative effort of 4H, the Y, Boys and Girls Clubs and Girls, Inc to reach the hardest-to-reach kids in 9 cities around the country. Nav Deol-Johnson, who administers Imagine Science, has done the heavy lifting of recruiting clubs that want to try the program. (It's the first time Imagine Science is offering a packaged curriculum to all their clubs, so this is something new for them.) The clubs then promote the program to interested kids.

Imagine Science has so far been happy to help involve interested clubs that belong to one of those four youth-serving organizations but are not inImagine Science cities by letting them join in training and data gathering. However, the training for this summer is at capacity, unless overwhelming demand leads to us holding another facilitator training--two three-hour sessions .

If there is enough interest, Jan and I can probably offer training for next fall, spring, or summer. But it's a heavy lift for a club:15 hours of programming, computers for every kid, two three-hour training sessions... and at this point we would still want to collect data on every club. Usually this means that someone has to find extra funding for program facilitators/club leaders; it's not something I would ask of volunteers.  On the other hand, both the book and the facilitator's guide are going to be widely available, so one could try to do it another way. Best if anyone interested gets in touch with us directly, though!

Hi Becky, I am glad to hear you enjoyed learning about our project. What a cool idea to have your ACRES participants view animations of a hypothetical afterschool activities and discuss them! Are you asking about the animations we have here in our video, or the animations that will be created to share with youth in the clubs? For the former, I could ask Barnas Monteith, who did much of the tech behind our video. For the latter, we are actually working with the Jackson Laboratory to create animations. These animations are not yet complete, but should be soon. JAX has a lot of great experience/skill in creating animations (you can find some on their YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheJacksonlab ).

And here is what Barnas says about what he used to make our video: "Mainly Openshot, with some xbox tool clips and some open source chroma key stock images. Other images were custom created in house with contract artists."

Thanks! I was wondering about the animations you referred to in terms of using with youth. I will look into what JAX has done. Thank you!

Thanks Marcia, and good to hear from you.  I'll check out your video, as it sounds like there are real parallels between our projects.  Social justice and science go hand in hand much of the time, and the pandemic has been a catalyst to bring them together, as Troy pointed out in his comment.  There's some pioneering work from Eric Gutstein 20 years ago that involved middle school kids in studying data on driving while black, as well as other social issues.  It's worth going back to examine his work.

Hi Zenon,

We are starting our large scale teacher PD next week, so this is a timely question.  Yes, teachers will do many of the activities as kids themselves would do this.  It's especially important for them to become comfortable with CODAP and the data activities. There is strong interest in this project among the club leaders, because it is so relevant to their students.  Of course, the data are sensitive, and it's important for leaders to know their youth and what experiences they (or their families) may have had with COVID.

Hi Zach.  Thanks for your question.  Yes, the tools are readily available for free.  
CODAP and Netlogo are up and running, and if you go to the CODAP website, you'll find all kind of interesting datasets, including what Bill Finzer and his colleagues are developing for our project.  We will have up to date data on immunizations as well as rates of infections.  This is a rapidly changing landscape, so current data are essential.

In a situation with poor connectivity, you can have kids read one chapter during each club session and consider the datasets off line.  It's not as powerful, but it's certainly a way in. On the other hand, we've seen kids use CODAP on their phones, and certainly on iPads, so working with this data may be easier than you think!

Thanks for the comments/questions, Zach! There is quite a lot available on the CODAP website that is freely available to anyone: https://codap.concord.org/ . Everything can run online in most any browser, so it works well on Chromebooks too. I believe CODAP can also work pretty well on slower internet/hotspot connections because it doesn't use up a lot of data.

Elizabeth, your question about sensitive issues is a good one.  We have made a point of asking kids about others who they know, rather than asking about themselves.  For example, we ask what they have seen about vaccine hesitancy in their community, rather than in their families.  Also, we don't examine data about rates of death, as that is too much.  Many of the kids have been impacted by COVID, and we are eliciting ideas *from leaders* about strategies for coping with sensitive COVID issues.  Leaders know their youth, and sharing strategies for addressing sensitive issues during a PD workshop has been very helpful to them.  The issues include not only the personal devastation that may have impacted kids' families, but also issues around political differences within families.  For example, what might kids do if their families take COVID less seriously than kids themselves?

Hi Perrin,

Your daughter will have many choices, and epidemiology or virology are good ones!  We are working through Imagine Science, which is a STEM-focused group that works with underserved kids throughout the country, mostly in cities like Houston, NYC, Denver, etc.  They are expanding to a few less urban sites.  Nav may want to respond more.  One unique thing about these programs is that sites need to devote 15 hours to any STEM unit they undertake, and the leaders get quite a bit of professional development.  They also work with PEAR on evaluation, and understand the importance of research/evaluation.  We don't yet have an expansion plan, because we just started March 1st!  But it is something we talk about a lot.  Your thoughts on dissemination are appreciated!

The Imagine Science network currently includes nine communities.  We work with communities that have local affiliates of our national partners - Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Girls.Inc, Y-USA and the National 4-H Council - and focus on working collaboratively to increase STEM opportunities for underserved youth.  For this project, we've invited any of the interested partners in the Imagine Science network to participate.

Samuel, when we are just a little farther along we should Skype and talk about how we could adapt to Kenya. That will be an exciting development.

Linda, I agree, including families in seeing what their kids are learning and discussing the issues raised would be great. Any guidance you have for how best to involve families in what already seems like a packed and almost overwhelming program will be welcome, and we can continue the conversation either here or offline!

Thank you for your comment. Our CODAP partners have made it possible for some data sets to keep updating themselves directly in the program, which is very helpful.

Thank you for your enthusiasm, April! The only place for art right now is in the PSA that kids are asked to create during their last three club sessions. We want them to be creative in any media--to dance or sing their message or film it instead of just making a poster. It will be up to them--but our pilots did not include the PSA, so we don't know yet how it will go. There is also a little bit of role-playing, which could be considered theater...

Hi Martin, and thanks for your comments and intriguing suggestion about collaboration.  We've also worked through a sister project (Data Clubs) on data about ticks and Lyme disease, teens and technology, and sports injuries.  We don't know whether there's a correlation between "relevance" and continued engagement with the data when there's more of a challenge. We are seeing anecdotally that relevance relates to the quantity and quality of the questions kids ask about data.  We have a Data Dispositions survey that could be used to gauge initial level of relevance and then look for correlations with depth of subsequent exploration of data.  Thanks for sparking our thinking on this!

Hello, Ying. I will take a look at your video, and then yes, let's talk!  

Thanks, Pendred!  We are currently exploring a project that would involve creating a book -- as you did -- along with a companion AR/VR experience.  How can I get in touch with you?  ycwu@ucsd.edu -- P. S.  I loved Tumblehomebooks.  What a great resource!  I was really impressed by the anthology of science poetry.  I've been looking for something like that for a long time.  

Ron, we are very pleased to have received funding from STEM Next!  Nimble educational interventions were called for as the pandemic swept the world, and your nimble and timely funding enabled us to meet kids needs as they were becoming curious and concerned about COVID.