A new Science-related competition now open to our students--runs February through May!

The Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), a not for profit assessment organization, is sponsoring a high school competition to get students interested in Data Science. 

The competition begins on Feb. 27 and ends on April 28.  NWEA is currently recruiting high school teams to participate. Students or teachers interested in this competition should contact DS4E@nwea.org for “getting started” materials – including parental consent forms and rules. 

Per their website:

The NWEA Data Science for Everyone (DS4E) Competition provides participating teams of high school students with data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study, which is a study of 15-year-old students’ knowledge of mathematics, reading, and science. For this competition, we utilize a subset of the full data on students’ mathematics assessment scores, along with a host of demographic and psychological variables. Participating students will be tasked with predicting mathematics assessment scores by building machine-learning models based on the demographic and psychological variables in the dataset.

We will utilize the browser-based Kaggle data science platform to host the NWEA DS4E Competition. We chose to run this as a competition, rather than to present it as an activity, to maintain student interest and motivation and to encourage interaction with data and research scientists at NWEA. We view this as an opportunity for NWEA to give back to the community of high school students and as a way for us to contribute to our mission. The best part? The winners of the competition, judged by the accuracy of their prediction model, will be awarded a scholarship that they can use for their future college or professional studies!

How it works

The DS4E Competition is designed to provide opportunities for students to engage with data in a way that requires minimal prior knowledge or experience. The PISA data set has a limited number of variables (sometimes referred to as “features”) used to predict test takers’ mathematics test scores, making it accessible to beginners. Further, the competition is hosted on the free-to-use web-based Kaggle platform, so students only need internet access to participate.