Now that students have had the chance to see and evaluate various data visualizations, they will learn to make visualizations of their own. This lesson teaches students how to build visualizations from provided datasets. The levels in Code Studio provide a detailed walkthrough of how to use Google Sheets to create several different kinds of charts. While this lesson focuses on the Google Sheets tool, other tools may be substituted at the teacher’s discretion, and MS Excel support is coming soon to the lesson.
The main activity teaches students to build different chart types (scatter, line, and bar charts) from a single data set. It should be emphasized to students that the purpose of this lesson is to explore and experiment with creating different types of visualizations, not to build the perfect chart. Students will have a chance to create and customize their own charts. At the end of class, students compare their custom visualizations with those of their classmates.
Students will be able to:- select the appropriate type of data visualization to discover trends and patterns within a dataset.- create a bar, line, and scatter chart from a dataset using a computational tool.- use the settings of a data visualization tool to manipulate and refine the features of a data visualization.
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For this Practice PT students will analyze the data that they have been collecting as a class in order to demonstrate their ability to discover, visualize, and present a trend or pattern they find in the data. Leading up to this lesson, students will have been working in pairs to clean and summarize their data. Students should complete this project individually but can get feedback on their ideas from their data-cleaning partner.
Note: This is NOT the official AP® Performance Task that will be submitted as part of the Advanced Placement exam; it is a practice activity intended to prepare students for some portions of their individual performance at a later time.
Students will be able to:- create summaries of a dataset using a pivot table.- manipulate and clean data in order to prepare it for analysis.- explain the process used to create a visualization.- design a visualization that clearly presents a trend, pattern, or relationship within a dataset.- create visualizations of a dataset in order to discover trends and patterns.- draw conclusions from the contents of a data visualization.
