4. The Birth of a New Discipline: Data Science Education

Data science is a young field of research and its associated educational knowledge—data science education—is even younger. As of the time of writing this book, data science education has not yet gained recognition as a distinct field and is mainly discussed in the context of the education of the disciplines that make up data science, i.e., computer science education, statistics education, mathematics education, and the educational fields of the applications domains, such as medical education, business analytics education, or learning analytics. There are, however, voice that call to integrate the relevant knowledge from these educational disciplines, and to form a coherent and integrative data science education body of knowledge, based on which data science programs can be designed. In this chapter, we present the story of the birth of the field of data science education by describing its short history. We focus on the main efforts invested in the design of an undergraduate data science curriculum (Sect. 4.2), and on the main initiatives aimed at tailoring a data science curriculum for school pupils (Sect. 4.3). We also suggest several meta-analysis exercises that examine these efforts (Sect. 4.4).