Gapminder: how to use as a teaching tool?

Graham Webster pointed me to this interesting site that’s full of data and graphs. Should be great for teaching, and for research too, in enabling people to look up and graph data quickly.

I’d like to develop some homework assignments and class-participation activities based on this site. We should be able to do better than to tell students: Hey, look at this, it’s cool!

To start with, one could set students on to it and ask them to find pairs of variables with negative correlations, or pairs of variables that are approximately independent, or pairs that have zero correlation but are not independent. Or one student could pick a pair of variables, and the other could guess the regression slope.

I’m sure more could be done: the challenge is to get the students to be thinking hard, and anticipating the patterns before they see the data, rather than simply passively looking at cool patterns.

3 thoughts on “Gapminder: how to use as a teaching tool?

  1. I tutor introductory statistics and I have been using Gapminder for awhile. However, this is a slightly newer version, the original allowed the user to choose the axises and the included countries.

    At the beginning of this summer I typically showed a positive correlation (and slope) by graphing life expectancy versus GNP per capita (which is now chart 5). Then I showed them an uncorrelated relationship by plotting life expectancy versus women as a percentage of work force. After that I would choose two variables and asked the student if it would be positively, negatively, or uncorrelated. We then watched the ensuing animation.

    I did this with the old tool (link is above), so I am not sure how I like these pre-chosen charts.

  2. I am using Gapminder to teach direct and inverse correlations between data, but I'm doing this with high school freshmen. Basically what I did was I told them what direct correlation means, gave them some simple examples from their everyday lives, and then have them play with Gapminder in pairs to find some pairs of variables that give direct correlation. Then I asked them to find countries that fall out of the general trend and to figure out, based on common sense, why the quantities are in direct correlation. Same with inverse/negative correlations. It took them 45 minutes or so but they finally figured out what the data look like for these two types of relationships! It took longer than expected (what doesn't?) but it's working out really well for the kids. I'd imagine that it'll work even better for older students like the ones you have. The hard part is to keep them off Facebook during the exercise!

  3. Dear Sir,

    I have the pleasure to brief on our Data Visualization software "Trend Compass".

    TC is a new concept in viewing statistics and trends in an animated way by displaying 5 axis (X, Y, Time, Bubble size & Bubble color) instead of just the traditional X and Y axis. It could be used in analysis, research, presentation etc. In the banking sector, we have Deutsche Bank New York as our client.

    This a link on weather data :

    http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/aims/

    This is a bank link to compare Deposits, Withdrawals and numbers of Customers for different branches over time ( all in 1 Chart) :

    http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/bank-trx/

    Misc Examples :

    http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/airline/

    http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/stockmarket1/

    http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/tax/

    http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/football/

    http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/swinefludaily/

    http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/flu/

    http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/babyboomers/

    http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/bank-trx/

    http://www.epicsyst.com/test/v2/advertising/

    This is a project we did with Princeton University on US unemployment :

    http://www.epicsyst.com/main3.swf

    A 3 minutes video presentation of above by Professor Alan Krueger Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and currently Chief Economist at the US Treasury using Trend Compass :

    http://epicsyst.com/trendcompass/princeton.aspx?h

    Latest financial links on the Central Bank of Egypt:

    http://www.epicsyst.com/trendcompass/samples/Aggr

    http://www.epicsyst.com/trendcompass/samples/bala

    http://www.epicsyst.com/trendcompass/samples/bank

    http://www.epicsyst.com/trendcompass/samples/egyp

    http://www.epicsyst.com/trendcompass/samples/curr

    I hope you could evaluate it and give me your comments. So many ideas are there.

    You can download a trial version. It has a feature to export EXE,PPS,HTML and AVI files. The most impressive is the AVI since you can record Audio/Video for the charts you create.

    http://epicsyst.com/trendcompass/FreeVersion/Tren

    All the best.

    Ossama Hamed

    Technical Director

    Epic Systems
    http://www.epicsyst.com

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