Computational Essays as an Approach for Reproducible Data Analysis in lower Secondary School

Data Science has become an increasingly important aspect of our everyday lives as we gain a lot of different insights from data analyses, for example in the context of environmental issues. In order to make the process of data analyses comprehensible for lower secondary school students, we developed a data analysis project for computer science classes, focusing on gaining insights from environmental data by using the concept of epistemic programming. In this article, we report on the second implementation of this project, which was conducted in a ninth-grade computer science class. Concretely, we want to examine, how far the students were able to create computational essays to conduct reproducible data analyses on their own. In this regard, the computational essays created with the help of the professional tool Jupyter Notebooks will be examined in terms of aspects of reproducibility.