DS4ALL Summer 2026: Teaching Data Science to High Schoolers with Texera

July 6–10, 2026 · ISEB Building, UC Irvine

The fourth Data Science for All (DS4ALL) summer program wrapped up at UC Irvine, bringing high-school students on campus for a week of hands-on data science and machine learning — taught almost entirely through the open-source Apache Texera (Incubating) platform.

The premise of DS4ALL is simple: students should not need years of programming experience before they can do real data science. With a “no code and low code” approach built on visual workflows, participants spent the week working with actual datasets rather than waiting to earn the privilege.

01 What the Program Covers

Over the week, students worked through the core concepts that underpin practical data science: data modeling, data cleaning, data wrangling, and visualization. From there the program moves into basic Python programming for data processing, and then into AI and machine learning techniques — building and training models, running inference, and working with classification and clustering.

Each day pairs a morning lecture with an afternoon lab session, so concepts introduced in the morning get applied the same day. The week builds toward a capstone project in which students analyze real data end to end and present their results at a final showcase, with family members invited to attend.

02Why Texera

The barrier for a ninth grader entering data science is rarely the ideas — it is the toolchain. Environment setup, dependency management, and boilerplate code can consume the entire week before a student ever sees a result.

Texera's visual workflow model removes most of that overhead. Students assemble pipelines by connecting operators on a canvas, see intermediate results at every step, and drop into Python User-Defined Functions when they want finer control. The same platform that supports research workloads scales down to a classroom without becoming a toy, which means students learn concepts that transfer directly to professional practice.

This also makes DS4ALL a genuinely useful source of feedback for the project. A cohort of first-time users working through a full data science lifecycle in five days surfaces rough edges that experienced contributors have long since learned to navigate around.

03Who Runs It

DS4ALL is organized by faculty from two campuses — Prof. Chen Li (Computer Science, UC Irvine) and Prof. Wei Wang (Computer Science, UCLA) — with instructors and staff drawn from professors and Ph.D. students at UCI and UCLA who work in data management, data science, AI, and machine learning.

The program is open to students entering 9th, 10th, or 11th grade, with Algebra II or Integrated Math II as the only prerequisite. Sessions run 9 AM to 4 PM daily on the UCI campus, with lunch provided.

Participants with their certificates at the close of the 2026 program.

04A Growing Outreach Effort

DS4ALL is now in its fourth year, and it sits alongside a broader set of education and outreach efforts that use Texera to lower the entry cost of data science — including workshops for middle school students and summer camps aimed at biology students with limited coding backgrounds.

Making advanced data science and AI accessible to people who are not primarily programmers is one of the reasons Apache Texera exists. Watching a room of high schoolers build and present working machine learning pipelines in five days is a reasonably direct test of whether that goal is being met.