On the 13th of April, 2024, a group of volunteers working for Compass Point Mentorship gathered at the Alviso Yacht club. The group held a datathon for young children, ultimately introducing them to data science and coding. Once all of the computers had been set up, the children began to arrive. After they had sat down and got to know one another, the guest speaker began her presentation on data science. They also learned about misleading graphs.

After the presentations were done, the children were split into separate groups, with one mentor for each child. The mentors had presentations explaining the python coding language, because all of the children already knew about Python, the mentors only brushed up on the slides. The children then got to work on the data, which was about cancer diagnosis among different groups. Helped by their mentors, the children tried to use code to organize the data to come to a conclusion. When they had a question or needed any help, they asked their mentor or any mentor near them. Sometimes, they had a group discussion, so everybody knew the answer if they ran into the same problem.

The remainder of the day was utilized for working with the data. However, there were a few notable events. For instance, two high schoolers running a stand were introduced. They were part of an organization whose goal was to give out used books and had a wheel of prizes that anyone could spin once for free. The prizes were candy or your choice of used books that they had. The grand prize was your choice of a long book or novel.

Finally, at the end of the day, presentations were held. Throughout the datathon, the mentor-child pairs had been working on a presentation detailing their findings based on the data provided. There were many interesting findings, and all of the data was presented particularly well. Throughout this datathon, the participants learned about data science, misleading graphs, and python coding. The introduction to data science was especially useful, because it allows children to learn advanced data processing techniques and explore the datasets of interest by themselves. In the near future, we hope to invite more students to join our journey.

By Ethan Cheung and Patrick Hao