Today in my data visualization class, I made students visualize meaningful differences between this year’s Super Bowl teams, the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. Except I made them do it with Lego.
A little silly, yes, but I wasn’t just gilding my Professor of the Year application, I swear. There was a purpose.
The first time I taught this class, I steered too hard into tools and code. We spent a little time on the history, theory and thinking behind data visualization and lot of time on teaching tools and later trying to cram enough d3 at them to make something. The problem was, in the race to get to the software tools, a lot of mental tools that would have helped them make better graphics didn’t get talked about.
So this time, I pledged to do it differently.
In the class – syllabus and other materials are online – we’re using Alberto Cairo’s The Functional Art and Edward Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information as texts. Today, we were talking about the form and function of graphics, about Cairo’s argument that the function limits the form. Cairo argues that the data, the questions the designer means the reader to ponder and the reader herself dictate the form, or at the very least constrain it to a limited set of choices.
That was the point I was trying to drive home: constraints. All journalism is constraint. Time, information, data, money, sources, access. So given a task and a constraint, what could you do?
Bring in the Lego.
Using squares and rectangles, I wanted them to make something. Visualize some data. We haven’t talked tools yet, so this would get them in the game without having to touch their laptops.
If you want to steal this idea, you need to do the following:
Mug an 8-year-old. I conveniently found one in my house and shook him down for a few hundred bricks and two large flat square pieces to act as a base. You may not have one so close. The number of bricks needed ended up being less than 100, so it doesn’t take much. I also swiped a couple of packs of sticky notes from the college office to act as data labels.
Choose a topic or dataset that allows for some exploration and decision making. I chose the Super Bowl because it was fun and there is no shortage of stats in easily obtainable form online. I also thought – mistakenly – that football stats would be easily understood. I was surprised by the number of students who didn’t follow football that closely.
Get out of the way. I split the class of eight in half and told them I wanted them to visualize meaningful differences between the teams. That’s it. They immediately set about discussing what they would visualize and how they were going to make the bricks mean something. The discussions about scale and how to make a brick represent X touchdowns or Y yards were fantastic.
To be clear, I wasn’t the first to do this, and one news organization did it as an election results tracker. But I’ll do it again. Class was energized, ideas were flowing and it was fun. Not a bad way to learn.