Concepts, practices, and perspectives for developing computational data literacy: Insights from workshops with a new data programming system

In this paper, we present a new visual block-based programming system designed for children to process, analyze, and visualize data. We introduce the system and describe how it was used during a series of 7 workshops with 27 children. During the workshops, children played the role of investigators and followed a storyline as part of the system to conduct data analyses to help the story's protagonist locate a missing family member. We present our findings as a framework of computational data literacy that builds on the dimensions of Computational Thinking proposed by Brennan and Resnick [8], with a focus on aspects that are specific to using programming for data processing, analysis, and visualization. We conclude with a series of recommendations for future designers of systems to support the development of computational data literacy.