I have decided to focus my challenge on unit 5, day 14-16. I feel that bar plots and mosaic plots are a fun way to get gets started on making their own data visualizations. We will be making them based on the types of pets that the students have as a fun entry activity.
Mosaic Plot.pdf (78.0 KB)
This is the mosaic plot that the students created with me. We took the simple Idea of asking the class who had examples of dogs, cats and fish. We also asked the class about gender. With this information, we made a simple mosaic plot together using google sheets.
As an extension activity, I asked students to look up survey results that compared two different categories that they could turn into their own mosaic plots. I thought this was a good way to get them to find different examples of data collection on the internet, it also gave them a different understanding of data visualization, because they were creating graphs from 3rd party information.
One challenge that I had was the software was hard to work with. I ended up having to find multiple Youtube videos that gave me information on creating the mosaic plots. I then took the chart and moved it over to a google drawings program to create the mosaic. This was time consuming and, hard at first, but with practice it ended up being a teachable moment. I feel that most people won’t have this issue, as I am one of the few teachers that is teaching this curriculum entirely off of chrome books.
I think eventually, I will introduce other topics other than pets, as not all students have pets. For those that didn’t, I had them give me an opinion on what pet they would like to have. I like teaching students about bar graphs prior to mosaics as well, this tends to scaffold nicely.
Additional resources would be the myriad of youtube tutorials on how to make different types of plots and graphs. I found these to be invaluable.