Project 1: Sibling Interviews · Grades 5–8
1.3 Types of Charts and When to Use Them
On YouTube as Why Use Charts | Lesson 1.3
A picture is worth a thousand numbers.
We turn the favorite colors from our interviews into a chart one step at a time, then ask why we draw charts at all, when an average or a percentage could carry the message. The answer goes back to how our brains handle numbers.
What you will be able to do
- Turn a column of categorical answers into a bar chart, and explain each step.
- Choose between a bar chart, a scatter plot, a line chart and a pie chart for a question about your data.
- Explain subitizing, and why charts help with numbers too large to see at a glance.
- Make, title and caption a chart in Google Sheets.
What you need
Your spreadsheet from Lessons 1.1 and 1.2, and Google Sheets.
What the lesson covers
- From 35 favorite colors to a bar chart: a dot for each answer, grouped by color, stacked into lines and sorted from tallest to shortest. Our eyes compare lengths more easily than areas.
- The scatter plot and the line chart, using the U.S. Social Security Administration’s baby-name records to follow how popular the name Alexa has been since 1880.
- What each chart is for: bar charts compare categories, scatter plots show how two numerical variables move together, and line charts are for when one of those variables is time. The pie chart works best with two or three categories.
- A dot experiment on subitizing, our ability to know how many things there are without counting, up to about four or five. Beyond that our sense of numbers gets fuzzier, which is why we use tally marks, commas in large numbers, and charts.
- Making a scatter plot, a bar chart and a pie chart from our interview data in Google Sheets.
Field task
Open your spreadsheet and make some charts. Select one or two of your variables, go to Insert > Chart, and try the chart types Google Sheets offers. For every chart you keep, go to Customize and give it a title and a short subtitle saying what you think the chart tells us. Add today’s four chart types to your concept table.
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 1.3, its practice questions and your saved progress come with a free account.
Accounts are for people 13 or older. Students in a class can join with their teacher’s code instead, and teachers and parents can make a free class dashboard.