Learn With Numbers

Project 1: Sibling Interviews · Grades 5–8

1.1 Building a Dataset

Lab lesson · 18 min · free with a free account

Loads from YouTube when you press play, and not before.

On YouTube as Why You Should Organize Your Data Like a Minecraft Inventory

A place for everything and everything in its place.
Motto of the day

We turn our handwritten notes into a table and try not to lose anything important. Our analogy today is Minecraft, and how players need to keep their chests organized.

What you will be able to do

  • Build your own spreadsheet in Google Sheets from your handwritten interviews.
  • Use cells, columns and rows, and read a cell coordinate like D4 the way you would read a point on a graph.
  • Write a header row, and explain why a table without one is a pile of numbers nobody can use.
  • Handle a missing answer honestly, rather than filling the gap with a guess.

What you need

Your notebook from Lesson 1.0, and a free Google account so you can open Google Sheets. If you have not done the interviews yet, do them first: this lesson is a follow-along, and it works far better with your own data than with ours.

The anatomy of a dataset A small table of interview answers. One highlighted column holds everyone's answer to a single question. One highlighted row holds everything recorded about a single person. The one box where they cross holds a single answer. Nickname Age Siblings Fav Color Pet Sparrow 14 2 Green Y Comet 13 1 Red N Juniper 15 4 Blue Y Column one question Row one person Cell one answer
Every answer gets one box, and nothing shares.

What the lesson covers

  • Making a spreadsheet file named Project 1 Sibling Interviews.
  • One row per person (one interview each), with the first row given over to the questions themselves.
  • Why every row keeps a nickname or a number: so you can match any row back to the page in your notebook it came from. You will make data-entry mistakes, and this is what lets you find them.
  • Being consistent on purpose. If the question was hometown, every answer is a town. Values for "Owns a pet" are yes or no, Y and N, or 1 and 0, but not a mix of these.
  • The difference between an answer that is genuinely empty and one you simply do not know. If someone has no pet, write that in the species column. If you never found out how many hours they sleep, leave it blank rather than filling it with a guess.

Concepts introduced

Cell
One box in the table: where a single row meets a single column.
Column
A vertical line of cells.
Row
A horizontal line of cells.
Start the lesson Watch and practice side by side: 17 questions on our interview data Checked as you go, with hints. Free with an account, or through your teacher’s class.

Field task

Build the spreadsheet. Work through your notebook and put every interview into a row, with the questions across the first row. Keep the conventions consistent as you go, because fixing them afterwards is much slower than choosing them now.

The field task is not extra credit, it is the curriculum. The dataset the class analyzes later is the one you build here.

Going deeper

Keep going with a free account

The video above is open to everyone. The rest of Lesson 1.1, its practice questions and your saved progress come with a free account.

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