#SWDchallenge: envision education!

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What comes to mind when you hear “back-to-school?” The crisp feeling in the morning air and the blank slate of a new academic year? The jittery anticipation leading up to the first day of school after a carefree summer? Seeing friends—or your crush—after a summer apart? Or maybe now you see things from the parent’s perspective: receiving your child’s classroom assignment, shopping for school supplies, seeing the schedule fill up with activities, or just feeling the passage of time. Looking at “back-to-school” through the lens of our careers, maybe it’s a reminder that we should be sure to carve out time for professional development in the coming months. 

Education means something very personal to each of us. It is also an important aspect of ensuring opportunity and improving quality of life. Your challenge this month is to find some data on education that’s compelling to you, analyze it, and create a visual that makes the “so-what?” stand out.

Rather than being prescriptive on a specific type of visual, this challenge is an opportunity to practice many aspects of effective data storytelling, including visual choice, color, and words. Let’s discuss these a bit more.

Visual choice means representing the data visually to easily enable the “a-ha!” moment of understanding. When you analyze data, you already know what’s interesting. To someone seeing your work for the first time, choosing an effective visual—whether graph, table or text—means you’ve enabled them to see what you already know is interesting in the data.. 

Color, when used sparingly, is one of your most strategic tools when it comes to the visual design of your data stories. Consider using color not to make a graph colorful, but rather as a visual cue to help direct your audience’s attention, signaling what is most important and indicating where to look.

Words make your data accessible. They’re the best way to indicate to your audience what you want them to understand in the data. There are some words that must be present in every visual: every graph and every axis needs a title (exceptions will be rare!). Don’t make your audience work or make assumptions to try to decipher what they are looking at. Beyond that, think about how you can use words to make the “so what?” of your visual clear through takeaway titles and annotations.

Here’s an example. I found some data cited in an article from The Roane County Reporter, my hometown newspaper in Spencer, West Virginia. The data compares high school students’ grades during in-person learning (2019 and early 2020) to distance learning implemented during the pandemic. 

Below you can see the progression from tabular data to making the takeaway stand out, through graph choice, adding color and finally, words. Notice how you immediately get the “so-what?” in the final visual. 

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Next, it’s your turn! 

The challenge

Find some data of interest related to education, analyze it and create a visual that makes the “so-what?” stand out. Submit your creation in the community by Sep 30th at 3 pm PT. No need to show the progression like I did above; you can simply share your final product.

You have free range within the topic of education—most importantly, use this challenge as an opportunity to celebrate the importance of continuous learning in our society. If there is any specific feedback or input that you would find helpful, include that in your submission commentary. 

If you need help finding data, check out our list of publicly available data; or get inspiration from our February 2018 Education + Black History Month’s challenge and collaboration with data.world. You can also get ideas from other community members’ visualizations related to education: in the Search option, simply filter for “Education” as shown below.

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Related resources

Here are a few related resources (not a comprehensive list). If you are aware of other good ones, please share in your submission commentary.