Advanced Data Literacy Culture Enabled through App Assistance for Competence Creation

In times of digitalization an understanding about the interaction with data and data privacy is becoming increasingly important. Even though students interact with data on a daily basis we identified a missing understanding about the possibilities of data collection and further processing to attain sensitive information about an individual. Facing this problem, we identified the need of teaching the competences of Data Literacy. Therefore, we developed the smartphone application “Data Mirror” as an assisting educational tool for raising awareness and creating transparency about data collection and processing. In order to simulate a real-life data collection, the app serves as a news app for the students, while secretly collecting and analyzing personal data about the user. The attained information about the students is subsequently anonymously demonstrated in the lecture. Results of the evaluation of the app recommend the introduction in the undergraduate engineering curriculum as an assisting tool to teach students the competences of Data Literacy.