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Data Science: Charts and Predictions from Spreadsheets

Two photos of students at classroom tables studying charts on tablets: a bar chart in one, a pie chart in the other.
Students in a Boston Public Schools workshop choose the chart style that best fits their data.

Create apps for surveys, collecting sensor data, and analyzing spreadsheet data.

Developing and Using Models: Today, making sense of data through visualization is a crucial skill for identifying real-world problems in your community and communicating evidence about them to others. Students create graphs using data from Google Sheets spreadsheets. They compare datasets and, in a final step, add a line of best fit. This guide provides everything students need to learn how to create phone apps with their own data.

  • Ages10–18+
  • Data fromSurveys, spreadsheets, and sensors
  • HardwareNone for most modules
  • ModulesThree, plus how-to guides

Modules

A spreadsheet of lake data flows into three phone screens that chart it, clean it up and predict a trend, over a photo of two children skating on a frozen lake.
IceMelt: years of lake-ice records go from a spreadsheet into an app that charts them, cleans them up, and predicts what comes next.

How-To Guides

Short guides, in Google Docs and Drive, for the features these modules use.

More units for the classroom: EcoBits Explorers · The Internet of Things · Teach with App Inventor