Data-Driven Narratives

Upper School computer programming II students recently completed a lab that charged them to use their knowledge of the Python programming language to tell a data-driven story in a graphical format.

 

In introducing this project, teacher Brianna Ifft compared the programming language to magic in its ability to take a spreadsheet full of numbers and bring them to life in a dynamic way that can tell a story. To make this magic happen, students had to:

The range of student work was impressive, as Ryan Kershner ’23, TK Muro ’21and Aaron Rothman ’21 truly showed tremendous efforts. One student compared a country’s violent (external) events to its suicide rates; another examined the interrelationships of urbanization rate, population growth and income inequality; and one analyzed a huge chess data set to explore which openings were advantageous for white and black game pieces.

 

Senior Alex Schapiro took his investigation of vaccination rates by ZIP codes beyond the formal assignment and created a publicly accessible interface to share his work. Seeing Schapiro’s work, Upper School science teacher Xiao Zhang connected him and Ifft with the school’s administration so he could add more detail to his map, showing where current Parker students reside relative to vaccination rates by ZIP code.

 

Ifft shared, “The students were eager to put their Python skills to work on this project. They expressed that they enjoyed the opportunity to choose their own real-world dataset to explore; it made it more interesting to them. While many of the students simultaneously shared that this was a challenging project for them, I do think they came away with a greater understanding of, and appreciation for, how Python can be used in critical ways such as data processing and visualization. One student even said this was super super fun!!”

 

She also offered, “There are huge datasets out in the world sitting in databases and spreadsheets, but that are unreadable to the human eye. This project gets at the importance of using programming languages to sift through huge amounts of data and bring it to life with graphs. It is only then that this data is accessible to everyone, and we can start to see the bigger picture. This allows us to ask questions about trends and who and what is missing from data collection. Without programming skills, this would be a much harder, more arduous task.”

 

Connecting the practice of the classroom to the wider world always helps add more meaning to a curricular experience. By taking a closer look at the way to use data to shape and tell a story, students have more insight into the infographics they experience every day.