2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Data Science as a field is growing rapidly, creating a demand for more practitioners. Programs that can build knowledge and skills in this area, such as the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) are impactful, but both time- and cost-intensive for participants and organizers alike. In contrast, we report here on a program piloting a streamlined alternative approach accessible to community college students, a demographic challenging to recruit to NSF REUs.

This experience report describes a pilot program educating area community college students in data science through the lens of sustainability using lightweight coding activities, accessible to students from any background. The program goals were to broaden students' horizons with regard to data science and sustainability, to measure changes in student scientific identity over time and over a series of workshops, and to strengthen relationships between the host university and the area community colleges. The goals were to both change student trajectories to be more computational, scientific, or data driven and to increase the number and quality of vertical transfer applicants from the community colleges to four-year universities.

The program consisted of 13 hours of workshops and a poster session. Half of the topics were focused on data science, with sessions on data representation, data visualization, and ethics. For data science sessions, sustainability was a secondary theme, comprising three 2-hour sessions. The second half of the program, a single 6-hour day long program, was focused on sustainability, and highlighted the use of data science to address the topics of wastewater surveillance, reforestation, and environmental challenges in space. Each workshop series was repeated at the main campus of each of the three area community college systems, all Hispanic Serving Institutions. The program culminated with a reflection poster session at the host university where students shared their changes in direction or perception as a result of participating in the program.

After each workshop, students completed a Likert format survey based on Hanauer’s Persistence in the Sciences survey and answered three open-ended questions about the workshop content. By holding the workshops at the area community colleges, providing a stipend, and leveraging Internet based computing resources, we lowered barriers to participation.

Despite the rapid organization of the program due to funding availability and academic calendars, this approach was highly impactful, as evidenced by students' scientific identity showing significant growth, by their responses to questions about the material presented, and by their enthusiastic and qualitative reflections on their end-of-program posters. While our program did not show growth in all the dimensions where longer programs provide more depth, approaches such as ours do have the potential to rapidly strengthen many students' scientific interests and computational skills at a relatively low cost in terms of time and money.