Digital TACTivities in Data Science: Investigating Engagement and Equitable Practices

A TACTivity is a tactile learning activity that involves manipulating physical or virtual pieces, encourages collaboration and engagement, actively engages learners in creative problem-solving, and can be used for teaching or reviewing concepts in a self-checking, non-permanent way, often with minimal instructions. We present a digital data science TACTivity that involves having learners interactively create a two-way table to model COVID-19 data. Learners use relative frequencies to determine the true positive, true negative, false positive, and false negative rates. The digital TACTivity reinforces learning about conditional probability, Bayes’ Theorem, and natural frequencies. In this article, we share learners’ engagement with the TACTivity and our evaluations of how the TACTivity can support equitable teaching practices within a design-based research framework.