Dr. Leslie Myint, Macalester College, Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science
Introduction to Data Science & Sustainability
Attending Valley and Ridge 2025 helped me revise my sections of Macalester's Introduction to Data Science course. Introduction to Data Science is already a fully developed course at Macalester. It builds students’ skills in data wrangling, visualization, and storytelling through daily group-based active learning exercises. The 5 weeks ending the semester are devoted solely to a scaffolded group project in which students develop and present a data story using one or more datasets.
One of the first activities that we did at Valley and Ridge was a sustainability gallery walk: pictures around the room spoke to sustainability in different ways, and we were asked to stand by the picture that most resonated with us and share why we made our selection. I plan to use this gallery walk on my first day of class to center sustainability as a theme for our course. To tailor this activity to a data science course, I will prepare data connections that are relevant to the ideas in each picture.
Valley and Ridge also introduced me to the flexibility of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a teaching tool. I plan to introduce the SDGs in the first week of class so that students have a concrete and comprehensive framework to draw upon as we engage with sustainability data throughout the course. At Valley and Ridge, we participated in an activity where we used physical cutouts of the SDG icons to identify SDGs that were most relevant to a given issue. The tactile nature of the activity and the way that it prompted relooking at all 17 goals were appealing characteristics that I plan to incorporate into the course’s activities, which primarily involve laptop coding work. I will also require students to make connections to the SDGs in their project work.
I plan to gradually replace the datasets used in class activities and assignments to ones with a more direct sustainability focus, starting with some waste management and air pollution-related datasets that I’ve already been working with. I will also add questions that prompt systems thinking about issues pertinent to each activity’s data.
I also have the potential to incorporate place-based learning by visiting sites around campus or the Twin Cities related to the datasets we’re exploring. Relatedly, I could propose that students investigate their own special places (e.g., hometowns) in some way as we explore a particular sustainability theme.