CodeVA and Capital One teamed up for a free data science course for high schoolers

In Virginia, high school students just got a new option for exploring careers in data science.

McLean fintech giant Capital One provided $100,000 for CodeVA, a Richmond-based computer science resource organization, to develop a data science curriculum for Virginia high schoolers. Developed with the help of Capital One technologists, the program’s creators hope it will help students pursue several careers. The curriculum was developed in accordance with the Virginia Department of Education’s decision to include data science in K-12 studies.

The new curriculum has 30 lessons in three modules. Course materials include over 600 pages with projects, Python notebooks and more resources, according to creators. It’s free for any instructor in the state, although it’s primarily aimed at formal education. Loudoun County Public Schools has already decided to use it as the data science textbook for the 2023-2024 school year.

CodeVA, according to executive director Chris Dovi, is an independent organization that works in advocacy and resource development for computer science literacy. With this administration’s computer science priority, CodeVA wanted to develop a data science curriculum, and Capital One’s experts helped make it relevant for students in their future careers.

“We know the learning objectives are, that are the state learning objectives, but [Capital One] made sure that they’re relevant for classrooms,” Dovi told Technical.ly.

Kurt Engleman, managing VP and finance chief risk officer at Capital One, said that this initiative was a win-win for the company. In addition to being a development opportunity for Capital One employees, who can learn how to teach their craft, it’s also building better future candidates for companies across Virginia. Data science jobs are going to be in high demand, he said, and data science has applications in all kinds of tech jobs.

“This incremental funding we did for the data science curriculum really will help propel students early on to be exposed to these concepts and then maybe even pursue this as a career,” Engleman said. “I think that would just be really beneficial for them, especially in the economy and where it’s trending.”

For now, the materials are for high school students and based on Virginia’s state education standards. But the curriculum isn’t region-specific, and Dovi hopes it will be useful for students nationally. He also said CodeVA hopes to develop resources for middle school and elementary school students, as well.

“What I hope is that it inspires students to be [able] to make these connections between computer science and data science and maths and, frankly, language arts as well,” Dovi said.

Those connections, he added, can show the applications of data science in careers in health science, athletics, math and even journalism.

“It’s just cool. Data is cool,” he said.