Evento
The Barcelona’s city council organizes, for the second consecutive year, the Barcelona Dades Obertes Challenge, a contest aimed at promoting the knowledge and use of open data in the schools of Barcelona city. This year's edition is organized, like the previous year, with the collaboration of Consorci d'Educació de Barcelona and Centro de Recursos Pedagógicos Específicos de Soporte a la Innovación y la Recerca Educativa (CESIRE); and Barcelona Activa S.A. were added.
The contest is aimed at students who are preferentially in the 3rd and 4th grades of ESO and from formative cycles, prioritizing public centers, through their teaching staff. By analyzing the environment, students will develop real projects that can help improve the city. With this objective, they must use the information published in the Open Data BCN website, which currently has more than 440 data sets on topics as diverse as housing, population, environment, accident, complaints, transport, culture and leisure, trade or science and technology, among others.
Every centre will participate only with one project. All proposals will be evaluated by leading university professors and professionals from open data world. The 10 projects with the best score will be presented at a public act, where students will have to defend their proposal in front of the jury and audience.
In addition, teachers from participating centers can enroll in a specific Training Plan about open data. The objective is to learn about data available in Open Data BCN and the analysis and visualization tools used for its treatment. In this way, teachers will be able to train and support the students to develop their projects.
The bases are already published and those centers that want to participate must fill the following document and make registration before October 1st. The students will develop the projects until the month of March. The final presentation act will take place on April 30, 2018.
Great success in the first edition
The first edition of the Barcelona Dades Obertes Challenge was held during the 2017-2018 academic year. The project, which was conceived as a pilot, was a great success, and this has led to this second edition.
The presented projects addressed various topics, such as the analysis of traffic accidents, the location of free wifi points or housing access. Although it was not easy to make a decision due to the high quality of all the works, the Institut Ferran Tallada won the first prize thanks to its project La cohesió social va per barris, where social cohesion indexes from different neighborhoods of the city were analysed, allowing a comparison of inequalities.
The award was a guided tour in the Media-TIC building, the hub of Barcelona's economic and innovation strategy, as well as a personalized data analysis workshop.
Open data as a training mechanism
With this initiative, Barcelona’s city council takes a step further in the introduction of knowledge and use of open data in the educational field, as other projects such as Escuelas Comciencia are also doing.
The use of open data in education allows students to work with real information, and understand what the actual results and benefits are on aspects that affect their daily activity, which contributes to foster critical thinking and citizen awareness. In this way, it contributes to develop their citizens’ spirit, and their implication in the social and economic reality that take place around them.
Noticia
Every day we receive a large amount of scientific-technological information from multiple sources: comments on social networks, news in the media, whatsapp messages... This information is conditioning our conception of the world, and our positioning as citizens. But the danger lies in the fact that not all the information that we receive has been contrasted: often it is superficial and unreliable content that we share uncritically, due to the need for immediacy or the lack of knowledge to confirm its veracity. Therefore, it is essential to have critical scientific-technological knowledge and an informed judgment.
Critical thinking promotes the ability to interpret and evaluate the information we have around. Thanks to this, it is possible to better understand our environment, supporting our participation. In addition, it encourages decision making, both professionally and personally, in a reasoned manner.
These skills are especially necessary for citizens who will participate in work and democratic life in the coming years, so it is good to provide students with the right tools for that purpose. One option is to incorporate active learning techniques that promote open data use to obtain value through intuitive and easy-to-use information analysis and visualization tools.
An increasing number of countries are aware of the potential of open data for education. Therefore, they are starting to implement various initiatives to introduce open data into the school. This is the case of Northern Ireland, which launched a competition to promote innovative ideas on how to use Open Data to support teachers, Argentina with the initiative "School in the cloud: open data in the classroom", or Germany, whit a project to develop software applications that take advantage of open data potential. In Spain, similar initiatives are also being developed, such as the Escuelas Comciencia.
Escuelas Comciencia, critical thinking through the scientific method and open data use
Escuelas Comciencia seeks to "help connect research and scientific-technological knowledge with the school environment, developing critical and reflective thinking through education based on open data and the application of the scientific method." In order words, it is an opportunity to take advantage of open data banks as didactic resources for carrying out scholarly scientific research that develops critical and reflective thinking.
Currently the program focuses on Secondary and High School students. Through different sessions, students approach the reality of research projects using open data. These projects are divided into 4 phases, following scientific method: information search, data analysis (through ArcGIS Maps), report development and communication of the results. The research topics revolve around real cases, such as the local impact of industrial waste, climate change or consumption of GM foods in Spain.
In addition to fostering critical thinking, thanks to Escuelas Comciencia, students also acquire digital skills and abilities, which facilitates their active, responsible and safe participation in society and digital economy.
This initiative was created by the Observatory of Scientific Communication and Ciberimaginario research group from Rey Juan Carlos University and Castilla La Mancha University, with the participation of Esri Spain, among other companies and institutions.
Escuelas Comciencia highlights the potential of open data as a source of learning resources, improving collaboration and reflective skills development. Thanks to this, students become active subjects, with greater power to make decisions and actively participate in society.