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Lesson 2: Stick Figures

Lesson 2: Stick Figures

Objective

You will learn how to observe, record, and organize data.

Vocabulary

collect, record, organize, representations, variables

Essential Concepts

Lesson 2 Essential Concepts

Data consist of records of particular characteristics of people or objects. Data can be organized in many different ways, and some ways make it easier than others for achieving particular purposes.

ATTENTION

For every single lesson:

Answer the questions in red font in your Introduction to Data Science (IDS) Journal.

Lesson

  1. Reflect on your data collection homework:

    • How many entries did you record?

    • Where do you leave the most data trails?

    • What could someone learn about you if that person had all of this data?

  2. You are going to act as a researcher and collect data on a strange group of people who appear to be completely two-dimensional. Your goal is to record as much information as possible about these people, and then organize the information in any way you choose.

  3. Meet the Stick Figures.


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  4. Select one of the Stick Figures and record all possible information about that Stick Figure.

  5. Organize the data from all 8 Stick Figures into a visual that you think represents the data.

  6. The images below are representations of the Stick Figures' data created by previous IDS students:

  7. As you look at the representations:

    1. Describe some similarities among the team posters and your visualization. Were the data organized in similar ways?

    2. Describe some differences among the team posters and your visualization. How were the data organized differently across the visualizations?

    3. What information was available about the Stick Figures on each card?

    4. Which representations made it easy to see what (or who) the objects were that were observed? Which representations made it easy to see whether different Stick Figures had different characteristics?

    5. Which representation makes it easiest to see which Stick Figure is tallest?

    6. If you were handed a blank Stick Figure and knew only the person's name, could you fill in the rest of the information?

  8. The general categories of information about a person or thing, such as a person’s height, are called variables. Variables are simply characteristics of an object or person. As statisticians, we use variable names to organize data into a simplified form so that a computer can read them. This will be discussed further in Lesson 3.

Reflection

What are the essential learnings you are taking away from this lesson?