About Data Adventures
A middle school curriculum that helps students develop data literacy through making, game play, storytelling, and creative problem-solving.
Rather than treating data as a collection of formulas or isolated math skills, Data Adventures helps students see data as a tool for understanding themselves, their communities, and the world around them. Students learn that data can take many forms, including numbers, words, images, sounds, and observations, and that meaningful questions, context, and human decisions shape how data is collected, analyzed, and used.
Data Habits of Mind
Throughout the curriculum, students practice four core habits that help them become thoughtful, creative, and responsible users of data.
Communication
Sharing data findings through clear explanations and well-designed visualizations for an audience. Collaborating with others to understand different perspectives.
Curiosity
Asking questions to deepen understanding, uncover more insights from data, or create new approaches to make sense of data. Questioning the reliability of data sources, methods, and findings.
Perseverance
Continuing to work through challenges or setbacks encountered during our work with data. Being flexible and able to change approaches based on new data or unexpected results.
Understanding Context
Looking for the context — the background, environment, and conditions the data was collected in, or how it is being used. Respecting privacy and protecting individual identities.
How it's structured
The curriculum is made up of three Data Adventures. Each one lasts about a week and is organized into four to five lessons. Every lesson follows a consistent rhythm of a warm-up, a data connection, a hands-on activity, and a reflection.
Avatar Maker
Turn your name and interests into data.
Festival Maker
Use data to design a music festival.
Game Maker
Build and balance games using data.
Across the adventures, students analyze both categorical and numerical data; create and interpret visualizations such as bar charts, dot plots, histograms, heat maps, and box-and-whisker plots; and use measures such as mean, median, mode, and range to describe patterns and distributions. Data Adventures intentionally integrates mathematics, science, engineering, English language arts, art, and social-emotional learning. Students use data to make decisions, design solutions, communicate findings, and create meaningful projects that combine quantitative evidence with creativity and storytelling.
What students can do by the end
Generate and analyze data, and represent it with appropriate visualizations.
Describe patterns and variability in a dataset.
Make evidence-based decisions.
Reflect on how data connects to identity, emotion, community, ethics, and STEM.
The ultimate goal is for students to see themselves as capable data thinkers who can use data to ask questions, solve problems, communicate ideas, and make positive contributions to their communities.
The partners
Data Adventures is developed in partnership with leading education and research organizations. The curriculum is being piloted in classrooms over a three-year study, supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Program.
The evaluation study
Data Adventures is being rigorously evaluated. Over two years, 60 teachers across multiple California school districts are taking part in the Data Adventures Study — a randomized controlled trial led by The Policy & Research Group that examines how the curriculum sparks interest in STEAM, builds students' confidence working with data, and broadens access to data science instruction.
Get involved
If you're a teacher interested in piloting Data Adventures, or a partner interested in the research, we'd love to hear from you.