Visualizing Elections

Curriculum Sample - Visualizing Elections

Teacher Facilitation Guide

Data visualizations can be powerful story-telling tools. Often without realizing, the manner in which data is depicted strongly influences the conclusions we draw from a situation. Traditionally, media companies leverage similar representations of election data during elections, and the main visual people interact with looks something like this:

Initial Observations and Analysis

Have students take a moment to analyze this visualization. Have them consider:

• What is this visualization’s main purpose? What is it trying to convey?

• What kind of data did they use to make this visual? What variables did they measure and what is the sample/population?

• What does this visualization do really well?

• What does this visualization not do very well?

• How else could you represent this data to improve the visual or tell a different story?
  

Have students turn to a neighbor and discuss their thoughts.

• • Do you agree on the main function?

  • What ideas do you both have about how else this data could be represented?

Jamboard Takeaways

Once discussions are complete, shareout what you and your neighbor discussed. We will document the major takeaways on a Jamboard.

Share the link to the Jamboard with students and have volunteers document takeaways as they come up.

Once you have a decent amount of takeaways, transition to the next phase.

Exploring the Actual Data

Students should now be looking at a Jamboard with some ideas. Share with them the election data resources at MIT, giving them a moment to play and explore before directing them to the presidential races.

Let them know we actually have access to the election data ourselves courtesy of the Election Lab at MIT. Go ahead and take a moment to download it and open it up.

• What are the variables we have information on?

• How is the data organized in the sheet?

• What ideas do you have about how we might visualize this data?

Brain Dump - Initial Brainstorming

Have students take a stack of sticky notes and give them the following questions:

Using the data in front of you, what are some of the stories we could tell? What are some questions we might be able to investigate? What other information might you want to investigate alongside this data?

You have 3 minutes. One idea per sticky. Once you write it down or sketch it, slam it down, and move onto the next one. There are no bad ideas in this phase.

Brain Dump - Categorizing and Discussion

Once the students finish their brainstorming, organize them into small teams of 3 or 4. Instruct students to share their sticky notes one idea at a time, saying what is on the sticky and then placing it on a whiteboard or large post-it.

Once students finish sharing their ideas, have each team group their stickies into major categories.

Challenge Delivery

Reconvene the class and direct students to their challenge for the week. Give each student a copy of the Challenge Write-up and read it aloud, together.

Use the remaining time in class for students to get brainstorming, encouraging them to partner and use each other as resources.

Reconvene the class and direct students to their challenge for the week. Give each student a copy of the Challenge Write-up and read it aloud, together.

Use the remaining time in class for students to get brainstorming, encouraging them to partner and use each other as resources.

Challenge Delivery Write-Up

Student Facing Sample

Data visualizations can be powerful story-telling tools. Often without realizing, the manner in which data is depicted strongly influences the conclusions we draw from a situation. Traditionally, media companies leverage similar representations of election data during elections, and the main visual people interact with looks something like this:

Datawrapper Workshop

Student Work Sample

As students investigate this problem, they often come across others who have visualized election data in different ways. As an exercise, we do a workshop using Datawrapper to make a spectrum map instead of a binary map with county election results. Here is an artifact from that workshop below: