We Design & Deliver Curriculum and Programs

BARI’s educational partnerships elevate the voices of young researchers by creating spaces for sharing civic research, data, and tech work of K-12 students.

• BARI team members provide support and mentorship to Boston Public Schools (BPS) high school students in AP Seminar and AP Research courses as they prepare their research papers and presentations.
  • Students from Charlestown High School attended BARI Conference 2026, where two students from Boston Latin Academy presented in the Conference’s poster session.
  • For the second year, BARI Advisory Committee and research team members served as judges at the Boston Latin Academy Research Festival, providing feedback and encouragement to young researchers. The winners of the Festival will present their research in the poster session at BARI Conference 2027.
  • BPS school librarians all received training on the Boston Data Portal as a resource for educators and students. As a result, the BARI team was invited to give a lesson on data visualization to second graders at the William Russell Elementary School in Dorchester. They analyzed the types of restaurants within a 5, 10, or 15 minute walk from their school and created line, pie, and bar graphs of their findings.
• The curriculum for Environmental Data Science: The Past, Present and Future of Our Boston Communities was designed by BARI in collaboration with Boston Public Schools and the City of Boston’s Department of Information and Technology to be rolled out at the start of the 2026-2027 school year in participating BPS high schools as a one-semester class.
  • Environmental Data Science combines environmental science with data science to engage with the past, present, and future realities of climate change’s impacts on Boston’s communities. This will be done through lectures, activities, discussions, and analytical tools used by professionals in the field.
  • Environmental Data Science uses hands-on activities to expose students to the analysis and interpretation of local data on climate and climate-related advocacy. Through these activities, students will draw on their own everyday experiences as they present visions of climate change resolution, prevention, and mitigation leveraging cutting-edge technologies and civic action.
• What The Tech? was an after-school spring workshop and summer internship program in 2024 and 2025 that engaged young Bostonians in serious questions regarding data science and emergent technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), from their potentials and perils to their impacts on the city they call home.
  • The curricula used by BARI as part of the What the Tech? programs is shared with K-12 educators who want to incorporate our lessons into their syllabus.
• The team also engages with youth as part of the Common SENSES sensor placement and mitigation planning processes.

BARI’s programs for community leaders ensure that non-profit and advocacy organizations have the technical support that may otherwise remain out of reach.

• During the spring of 2026, BARI hosted Program Evaluation Basics for Non-Profit Employees, a three-part, in-person series on program evaluation for local nonprofits and community organizations. Developed in collaboration with Greater Boston Evaluation Network, the series was geared toward organizations wishing to familiarize or strengthen their program evaluation skills, as well as learning about the curricula and guidance of program evaluation before potentially partnering with or employing professional evaluators. Across the three sessions, 15 attendees from 12 local non-profit organizations bolstered and broadened their evaluation skills and traded stories and strategies with their fellow attendees and facilitators.