Week 5 - Data

Monday 10:00 - 10:50

• Reading and writing data analysis:
  • Hand out some examples of data analysis reporting:
    • Extract from newspaper
    • Extract from data analysis report
    • Extract from blog post
    • Others? Tweets?
  • Ask students to give examples of things they liked and disliked. Why?
  • Ask students to give examples of things they trusted and distrusted. Why?
  • Use these to motivate next chapter.

Tuesday 09:00 - 10:50

• Data collection activity (used mainly to emphasise different data types, but can also use in future classes e.g. data viz and testing).
• Collect the following data as a class:
  • Gender (nominal)
  • Eye colour (nominal, usually have discussion around which categories to include)
  • Height (ratio, discuss units, measurement accuracy, keep consistent across class)
  • Date of birth (interval)
  • Order entered the class (ordinal, how to get this? stand in line, talk, etc.)
  • Foot size (interval (shoe size), ratio (foot length), discuss what we mean here)
  • Distance home-work (ratio, discuss units)
• Briefly discuss data visualisation concepts (distance, area, angle, colour…), and common data visualisation charts (bar chart, scatter plot, histogram, line plot).
• Give each group graph paper, each group to draw a data visualisation of some variables from yesterday’s data collection (e.g. eye-colour bar chart; height histogram; height-distance scatter plot) but do not give guidance.
• Each group shows their data visualisation to the class (using overhead projector) and explains why they drew that (data types). Let groups provide some feedback (and give feedback ourselves).