Gapminder

Gapminder is a web-based tool to explore large public data sets on all world nations. For a great example of the tool in use, see the video below by creator Hans Rosling.

I asked my students to go through a similar process to share their understanding of a public data set relating two variables. The data is objective and clear, but how each student interprets it is very open for discussion. Students use the tool to find interesting and unexpected correlations, but then use logic and research to make educated guesses at the causation of each pattern or anomaly in the data.

The in-class discussions were especially interesting when multiple students picked similar topics, especially when the cause was unclear. In reality, most relationships were caused by multiple factors, including a direct relationship between the two displayed variables and a variety of lurking variables that could also be visualized in a few different forms. Students had no choice but to discuss multiple world views on the reasoning behind the interesting relationships they discovered while working with an international data set.