Drawing Data With Kids: A Screen-Free Path to Data Literacy
At the 2024 AI Connect K-12 Data Science Conference, PayPal data science lead Gulrez Khan described teaching his children data literacy with drawing, board games and everyday counting. He urged parents and educators to use data from kids' daily lives instead of traditional data sets.
By The AI Enterprise Magazine Team4 min read
Key takeaways
- Start with kids' own data. Khan recommends data from daily life, such as letters in words or board game scores, over traditional data sets.
- No screens required. The book's exercises are offline and double as parent-child bonding time.
- Goal is affection, not instruction. Khan wants kids to fall in love with data so charts feel familiar, not frightening.
- Familiar charts build confidence. His daughter recognized a graph in a bird field guide and was not afraid of it.
- Book is expanding. It is being translated into Arabic and German, with more languages planned.
At the 2024 AI Connect K-12 Data Science Conference, a virtual event held July 25, 2024, Gulrez Khan, Author and Data Science Lead at PayPal, described how he taught his children data literacy with pencil, paper and household games. His talk centered on his book, "Drawing Data with Kids: Cultivating Data Literacy," a screen-free guide to visualization for children.
Khan said he wrote the book for his own kids. The listed starting age is 7 and up, but the readers he has seen most are parents, and they told him they benefit from it too.
How did a four-year-old inspire a book on data literacy?
Khan opened with a story from the pandemic years. Working from home in San Jose, he was building a tree graph of the questions people ask in Google autocomplete, while his son played with a toy Formula One car behind him.
The boy stopped, pointed at the screen and said the graph looked like the dome of a mosque. Khan tilted his head and agreed. He called it refreshing: a visual from his day job, read through the eyes of a four-year-old.
The moment, he suggested, showed what children bring to data. They see it without the baggage adults carry.
Why teach data literacy without screens?
Khan said his wife was mindful of screen time and set him a challenge, which pushed him toward a screen-free approach. Combined with the family's love of storytelling, that became the book's format: a story for each chapter, plus take-home exercises built on everyday life.
He also explained why he avoided the classic starter data sets. When he first learned data science, he said, the Iris flower data set felt foreign because he did not know the domain, and even pronouncing the categories was a hurdle.
His alternative was to bring data from places children already know. "The idea is not to teach them but to make them fall in love with data," Khan said.
What kinds of data activities can parents try at home?
Khan walked through several examples from the book:
- Bar graphs from words. He asked his kids to count the letters in a word such as "chocolate," then find an animal with fewer or more letters and compare them.
- A snoring graph. His 10-year-old daughter drew a graph of the pattern of his snoring, rising and falling.
- Snakes and Ladders. After his son complained that he always lost, the family counted snakes and ladders on the board and scored players, a simple version of the segmentation work Khan does at PayPal. His son ended up in the corner with fewer snakes and more ladders.
- Scrabble scores. The family tracked scores round by round.
- A heat map of state names. He had his daughter count the letters in each state's name and color the states by count, so the states with more than 10 letters stood out in red.
Khan said all of the stories are realistic fiction drawn from life at home.
What happens when kids stop fearing charts?
Khan's proudest moment came when his daughter was paging through a bird field guide. She called him over and said one of its graphs looked like a graph from his book.
"She was not afraid of it," Khan said. She tied the chart to a good memory instead of treating it as something to skip. He compared that to adults who turn the page when they see a formula.
He listed what he thinks works: no standard curriculum, charts paired with stories and exercises, and offline activity that builds parent-child bonding.
The book started as a personal project, Khan said, meant to be kept as family memories. It is now being translated into Arabic and German, with more languages planned.
What advice did Khan give parents and educators?
His message was direct. Skip the traditional graphs and data sets, he told parents and educators, and "bring data from the daily lives of the kids." Khan, who has worked in data for almost 20 years, including a decade at Microsoft before PayPal, said that approach makes the subject more interesting for children.
Where can educators keep learning about data?
Sessions like this one are part of AI Connect's work to bring data skills to students and teachers. For 2027, AI Connect has 24 free live webinars scheduled across four series: AI × Enterprise Panel Series, AI Demo Days, Agentic AI Showcases and Plug & Play Series. Registration for 2027 events is coming soon; details are at /webinars/.
Frequently asked questions
How can parents teach kids data literacy at home?
Khan suggested simple offline activities such as counting letters in words to make bar graphs, scoring board games like Snakes and Ladders and Scrabble, and coloring a map by the number of letters in state names.
What age is Drawing Data with Kids for?
Khan said the starting age is 7 and up, though parents have told him they benefit from reading it too.
Why avoid traditional data sets with kids?
Khan said unfamiliar domains, like the Iris flower data set he learned on, can make learning harder. He recommends bringing in data from children's daily lives.
This article is based on remarks by Gulrez Khan, Author and Data Science Lead, PayPal at AI Connect K-12 Data Science Conference 2024 on July 25, 2024. More coverage: More AI Connect Events.
Filed under: People, Culture & Leadership, AI Use Cases & Applications
