Open Data Visualization in Danish Schools: A Case Study

Increasingly public bodies and organizations are publishing Open Data for citizens to improve their quality of life and solving public problems. But having Open Data available is not enough. Public engagement is also important for successful Open Data initiatives. There is an increasing demand for strategies to actively involve the public exploiting Open Data, where not only the citizens but also school pupils and young people are able to explore, understand and extract useful information from the data, grasp the meaning of the information, and to visually represent findings. In this research paper, we investigate how we can equip our younger generation with the essential future skills using Open Data as part of their learning activities in public schools. We present the results of a survey among Danish school teachers and pupils. The survey focuses on how we can introduce Open Data visualizations in schools, and what are the possible benefits and challenges for pupils and teachers to use Open Data in their everyday teaching environment. We briefly review Copenhagen city’s Open Data and existing open source software suitable for visualization, to study which open source software pupils can easily adapt to visualize Open Data and which data-sets teachers can relate to their teaching themes. Our study shows that introducing Open Data visualizations in schools make everyday teaching interesting and help improving pupils learning skills and that to actively use Open Data visualizations in schools, teachers and pupils need to boost their digital skills. © 2019, Vaclav Skala Union Agency. All rights reserved.