Dive Brief:

• A National Science Foundation-funded project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will help high school students in New York City learn about mathematics, civics, data collection, and data analysis starting this month.
• The project’s Local Lotto module, which was tested by New York City schools last month, will have students gather data about lottery ticket sales and opinions about the lottery from interviews with ticket buyers and sellers, then present their findings and analysis through multimedia.
• The new City Digits project was created with funds from a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to the Civic Data Design Lab in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Campus Technology reported.

Dive Insight:

According to Sarah Williams, director of MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab, the NSF grant was to help promote the creation of a mapping tool that could help teach about civics and math. One of the goals of the program is to help develop data literacy in the students to help them with decision-making in the future that will be based on big data. Another goal is to promote learning about their communities, and to use data as a civic engagement tool.