Teachers & Homeschoolers

You’re the reason we make this. The lesson videos and datasets needed to follow along are free to use in your classroom or homeschool. This page explains how the pieces fit together so you can run it as a real unit instead of assigning videos.

Sign up as a teacher

How the course is built (and why it works in a classroom)

Instead of topics, we follow projects. Each project tries to understand the real world and answer a question, from planning to finished analysis. Along the way, students build their own understanding and meet each concept as the need arises. That way the ideas feel discovered rather than assigned. We balance this with traditional lecturing and direct instruction, because relying on discovery alone often favors students who are already ahead and leaves behind those who struggle.

• X.0 lessons = planning. A lighthearted lesson on the topic to pique their interest. You can go deeper than the videos into the background, the research design, and what could go wrong. Excellent for class discussions.
• X.1+ lessons = labs. Follow-along work in Google Sheets or Colab. You can run the video live in class and encourage students to follow along in the second half. The students can rewind and help each other when they feel stuck.
• Every lesson ends with a field task. These hands-on assignments are what make the curriculum work. For example, Project 1 has students interview 15 to 20 people and build a dataset from scratch.
• Every lesson covers three to five concepts, and each one builds on the ones before it. We encourage students to keep a running notebook of them, which we call the concept table. You can watch one being built in Lesson 1.2.
• Spaced repetition is built in. Core concepts return across lessons and projects on purpose. When a student meets standard error for the third time, in a third context, it sticks.

Running Project 1 as a unit

Project 1 is ten video lessons. It fits a six-week grading period if you pair some lessons up. At one lesson a week, it runs ten weeks. You can use the course as a standalone data unit inside a math or science class, a semester elective, or a club. Later projects move to larger datasets and to Google Colab, so the sequence can stretch across multiple years without repeating itself. Here’s how to run it:

1. Watch the lesson together.
2. Assign the field task.
3. Keep the concept table ritual.
   • Each student maintains a running table (Concept / Related Concepts / Description / Example / Note) that becomes their own textbook by the end. It combines note-taking, spaced repetition, and spreadsheet practice in one habit.
4. Use our glossary for shared vocabulary.
5. Use the messy moments as discussion prompts.
   • Real data the students collect will be messier than textbook data. You can use it as a teaching opportunity.
6. Tools: Google Sheets, Google Colab, Looker Studio, R.
   • If your students have Chromebooks, they have everything. There is no software line item.

The classroom kit

Each project comes with a classroom kit: lesson plans, quizzes, printable homework, and answer guides. The kit for Lesson 1.0 is free to download. The kit is a benefit for our Patreon community, which is what keeps the lessons themselves free for every student. You can also purchase it on Teachers Pay Teachers. If you’d like your school’s teachers to have the kit, contact us and tell us about your school.

When your class finishes a project, tell us how it went and how we can improve our lessons. Classroom stories about what confused the students and what lit them up are the most valuable dataset we have.

Project 1 is free on Learn With Projects, our practice site, with a free account. Make a class dashboard, give your students a code, and they join with a nickname, with no account or email of their own. Every student in your classes then gets the practice questions for every lesson of Project 1, and you see how each one does on each question. Learners aged 13 or older who study on their own can make their own free account on the learning page.

Want more support?

• The classroom kit: lesson plans, quizzes, printable homework and answer guides for every project, so you don’t have to build them from scratch. See above for how to get it.
• The Library: other organizations we trust for data-literacy teaching, including classroom programs like Census at School and Skew The Script.
• Homeschooling: how a family runs a project at home, with or without a math background.
• Free Data Sources Online: our video series on where to find free data for your own class projects, starting with Kaggle.
• Consulting: we work with schools on data-science curriculum. We currently advise a middle school and teach a homeschool group. Ask via the contact form.