Ada Ren-MitchellBeginnings of a “data entry-way”
What data is meaningful to you? Do you track your heart rate, the number of steps you take, the hours you slept, or how much water you drink in a day? Or do you ponder over what you like to do with your friends and family, or how the weather or geopolitical environment affect your mood?
When we think about data, we might think about big data, about how our online activity gets fed into hungry databases, or about how scientists and software developers are trying to make sense of it all to solve problems (for good or for profit). Or we might think about our color-coded spreadsheets that track our spending, that track whether we’re passing a class, or a quick table that compares the features of new sneakers we’re shopping for.
More importantly, what are the data skills that can help us start to navigate data that is meaningful to us? In designing a new data activity, Data Gems, for the Public Library Innovation Exchange (PLIX), I combined reflections from my past experience in informal data science education with constructivist pedagogy, to imagine a data learning experience that taps into the 4P’s of creative learning: projects, passion, peers, and play. More specifically, how might we tap into our personal passions to playfully engage in emergent data science literacy?
In this blogpost, I’ll share reflections of my data experiences, the people behind the inspiration for the new Data Gems activity (a past supervisor, a Media Lab facilities person, a book, and two 5-year-olds), what goes into the activity, and what might come next.
Some personal data experiences
Just before I joined PLIX, I was working on data education projects under Andee Rubin, at TERC, a math and science education research organization. In our research circles, Andee is fondly called the data queen, for her many decades of work in math education, and belief that math education should be fun and engaging. Some of the projects I worked on included:
- STEM literacies through Infographics where we worked with high school teachers to include interest-driven infographic creation as part of their curriculum, and tapping into graphic design skills, data visualizations, and graph literacy.
- Data Clubs where we supported middle school youth to use CODAP as a tool to explore, visualize, and analyze topics they care about.
- …and ESSIL where we designed a 3-day curriculum that includes a day at the NY Hall of Science’s Connected Worlds exhibit for middle schoolers to investigate and analyze an interactive data visualization created from their own collaborative and competitive experience at the exhibit, to better understand systems thinking.
From these projects, I noticed that a key part of early data literacy education is for people to use data that they've experienced or data that is meaningful to them. Within that space, even young people can quickly grasp and read graphs and more complex visualizations.
To me, math and data are playgrounds for understanding our relationship to the world around us through art. That art could be a humble bar graph or a complex interactive data visualization. I’ve also spent the past 14 years playing in the field of multimodal gesture research, diving into the relationship between the sounds we make in our speech, our hand movements, and what we mean when we say things a certain way. Because there’s so much going on, I created a variety of exploratory data visualizations, to try to reveal patterns in the relationship between speech and gesture. In these explorations, I found that there's no "best" visualization that can clearly reveal to me or others the intuitions I have about human speech and gesture communication.
Three Bears of Data: A “just right” amount of data
Back in 2017, Andee gave a keynote on "The Three Bears of Data: Big, Little and Just Right" at the New York Hall of Science.
Sitting in the middle chair, Andee emphasized that for youth to engage with data, there needs to be just enough data that allows them to discover patterns and relationships between attributes. When the data is too small and not correlated in a meaningful way, it doesn’t support the discovery of new relationships and patterns. Meanwhile, working with big data requires an advanced toolkit of skills to understand, filter, and wrangle the data so that it can be useful and understandable to youth. So to create datasets that is “just right” for youth to play with, on topics that are interesting to them, requires someone with those data skills to help.
In my work at PLIX, I wondered whether there was a way to bring to light our innate data understanding by connecting it to fundamental data skills. And most importantly, start playing with small meaningful data, the data that we care about in our daily lives that is relevant to different ages.
A Found Gem of a Book
One quiet day at the Media Lab, Candido Monteiro, part of the facilities team, was cleaning out an old office, and found around 50 copies of a book titled Observe, Collect, Draw! A Visual Journal, by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec. He brought them me, believing I would be the best person to make the most use of it. (He was right.) Stefanie and Giorgia are two amazing women who gained (well-deserved) popularity back in 2015 for their year-long analog data drawing project, Dear Data, that takes a playful and humanistic approach to storytelling with data. Incidentally, Giorgia was an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow in 2018, the same year the book was published, which likely explains why the book was at the lab. (But not why it was collecting dust in a forgotten corner.)
Librarians and their data tracking
In October 2023, I included this book in the PLIX Creative Learning Ambassador welcome kit, inviting library professionals to explore data together in a fun way. Included in the welcome kit was a pencil bag packed with fun craft materials and goodies, and the Observe, Collect, Draw! book. In one of our meetings, we each visually organized the materials, to reflect the variety of ways our different brains organize information. Here are some examples below:
One PLIX Ambassador, Heba Thiele, noticed that the way she was tracking her health was very similar to what the book suggested. She was trying to pinpoint what’s going on with her health to improve her chronic illness.
Inspirations from two 5-year olds
In the fall of 2023, I helped run an OctoStudio workshop in Maverick Makerspace in Boston with a few members of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Media Lab. The young boy I worked with, after trying out OctoStudio, repeatedly came back to me to ask for help putting on chenille stem (a.k.a pipe cleaner) bracelets on his wrist. He told me that different colors represented different powers. Red is fire, and blue is water. Of course. After he went off to blast each of his newfound powers at his friends, I realized that each of us from a very young age, learned that colors can represent other things. The bracelets didn’t have to be on fire or wet to remind the young boy that he has fire and water powers. (Fun fact: combining fire and water powers gives you steam power, which is still widely used for generating electricity, through coal, natural gas, and even nuclear power plants!)
In spring 2024, I was working with PLIX Intern Christy Ly on making wearable data bracelets, thinking about generative data questions, and different ways to make it easy to track data. We tried questions like, what’s something you want to track about yourself? Or what do you want to learn about yourself? The questions felt difficult to answer because it was hard to find a place to start.
At a perfect moment, a 5-year old stopped by with his mom, a friend of my supervisor. They were visiting from out of town, and he’s been excited to see his friend again. When we asked him what he liked to do with his friends, he went on and on and on! Because the question worked so well, Christy and I shifted from thinking about tracking personally meaningful data to thinking about data of our friends: what we like to do with them, how often we check in with them, and how they feel. We were especially delighted because this tapped into the “peers” of the 4Ps of creative learning.
Designing PLIX Data Gems
A key component of every PLIX activity is the zine. Short for “magazine,” the zine is a printable sheet of paper that can be cut and folded into a small booklet.
In the Data Gems activity zine, we start with questions that sparks data that is meaningful to learners. They’re invited to create their own rules and data representations.
- What might different colors represent to different learners?
- What might different shapes and symbols represent?
- How might learners want to track their data?
In thinking about easy ways to track and play with data, we tested out ideas like friendship data bracelets, knotted keychains, and data journals. As learners track more data, they may notice trends, patterns, and relationships between the data they choose to track. What decisions might they make? What decisions might you make when you start tracking your data?
In the Data Gems zine, we highlight the data skills to experience: such as the many fun ways to represent data, how doing so can be similar to creating secret codes like in cryptography, and how our different personal perspectives and values may lead to biases.
What's next?
In June 2024, I'll be working with a cohort of public library professionals to test out Data Gems and continue refining and adding their ideas to the activity.
I'm curious about what a constructivist AI education pathway might look like. Maybe Data Gems could be part of that pathway, beading, knotting, and coloring our way towards a deeper understanding of these changes in the world.
Until next time, Ada \(ᵔᵕᵔ)/