SportSense for Data Literacy: Applying Sports and Movement for Authentic and Personal Data Interactions in Elementary Schools
Data science education is still new to young learners within schools. Based on the increasing call from local districts and states, we developed a sports and data science unit for a 5th grade computer science course. The inclusion of sports resonates with goals to broaden participation in computing fields by highlighting how this knowledge can be applied to the real world beyond classrooms. We implemented SportSense for Data Literacy, which is an 8 week sports and data curriculum for 5th grade students to learn and practice data processes for collecting and interpreting their personal physical movement. This paper covers SportSense’s motivation and goals, and we described how this curriculum met these metrics in our implementation across 32 schools in the spring of 2025.