Michelle H. Wilkerson (University of California, Berkeley), Wei Yan (University of California, Berkeley), Tamar Fuhrmann (Teacher’s College, Columbia University)
Abstract
Rivulet utilities are Jupyter notebooks designed for educators who want to use real-world, relevant datasets in classrooms, but who may find searching large public data streams overwhelming. Rivulet helps educators find and assess subsets of data from national databases to identify datasets that are specific to defined times, locations, or are otherwise relevant to their students and curricular needs. The notebooks do this in a way that guides users toward data that exhibit key statistical and domain-specific characteristics that have been identified in the educational literature and/or by domain experts to be pedagogically generative. Along the way, the notebooks gently introduce general techniques and skills related to fetching and processing data using APIs and Python.