Engaging Students and Teachers with Big Data: Adapting the All of Us Research Hub for Use in High School Computer Science, Data Science, and Statistics

As the volume of biological and health data available continues to expand, and the data become more open and accessible, there is a great opportunity for introducing students and teachers at all levels to the power of big data and bioinformatics. One promising source of biological data for research and education alike is the NIH All of Us Research Program, which aims to gather health data from one million or more people living in the US and to increase the representation of groups historically excluded from research. This rich source of data is a promising tool for enabling students to engage in health data analysis. Through interactions with high school teachers in New England through our Teaching the Genome GenerationTM teacher professional development program, we know that high school computer science, statistics, and data science teachers are eager to integrate biology and health data into their classrooms but are lacking good resources to do so. Focus groups with high school computer science and statistics teachers revealed high levels of student interest in health and fitness data, a prominence of data labs as a teaching tool, and a lack of existing lab activities for high school computer science and statistics classes that focus on health data. Based on these focus group outcomes, we have proposed the development of a high school data science curriculum that utilizes data from the All of Us research program to enable students to investigate health disparities. Our outlined curriculum will guide students through evaluating how social determinants of health contribute to health disparities in the contexts of diabetes and cancer, with scaffolding to ultimately support students in an independent or group research project using All of Us data. The proposed activities are aligned to AP Computer Science Principles and AP Statistics skills and content. The All of Us program rightfully takes data and participant privacy seriously, requiring institutions and researchers who access participant-level data to have a Data Use and Registration Agreement in place. However, this presents a barrier to the use of the All of Us data for short-term lessons or projects in high school classrooms. To reduce this barrier, we have started development of a mock dataset that will emulate the structure of the All of Us data without giving students access to any personally identifiable information or protected health information from All of Us participants. Through development of our curriculum and mock dataset, we will enable high school students and teachers to engage with health data in an authentic way.