Dive Brief:

• Eli Sheldon detailed for EdSurge how he applied data analysis when building a kickball curriculum for middle school students as the computational thinking specialist for the Green Dot Public Schools in Washington.
• Game statistics were collected about players to help students pick line-ups, pitches and even when to switch players in the infield and outfield.
• Learning how to use data analytics also helped students in their other courses, such as math class and even in their music courses as they looked for “…similarities among songs in a genre,” he wrote.

Dive Insight:

Data analytics can be used in many courses, ranging from art and music to math and English. The truth is that many subjects can be stitched together, creating cross-curricular tie-ins to help students develop a broader landscape of what they’re learning. After all, that’s likely the world they’ll find themselves in when they graduate and start their careers.

Bringing math into music or the spectrum of STEM subjects into art classes more closely mirrors the way the real-world works, as Education Dive recently reported. English language arts teachers in particular can also encourage a cross-curricular mindset just by allowing students to select their own reading material rather than pinning pupils into picking literature classics. This can open the door to social studies topics or even papers from science journals.

Students are still focused on reading and comprehension when they are allowed the freedom to choose what they read, but the practice allows them to “..contemplate problems and situations that reflect the world as they know,” wrote researchers in a 2016 paper published in Universal Journal of Educational Research. “Learning is interrelated and information is connected.”