The Urban Data School is an initiative to bring data literacy education to primary and secondary schools. The Urban data school worked with schools in Milton Keynes to enable pupils to critically analyse complex Smart City data sets, and to use data literacy skills to investigate critical urban issues. Data literacy – the ability to use data as part of complex reasoning and to accurately critique and interpret data to ask and answer meaningful questions – is an important civic skill that forms the foundation of an innovative knowledge economy. The data made available by MK:Smart represent an important educational resource for teaching data literacy and the Urban Data School is the first initiative to use Smart City data – from energy data to satellite data – in education.
