Visualizing Data in the Classroom

Visualizing Data in the Classroom Rhode Island College student expands work on website helping high school students and teachers interpret real-life datasets

What might be one of the easiest forms of communication that humans can comprehend? Visuals.

Most of our resources are filled with them, ranging from textbooks to television. The use of scientific visuals such as charts, graphs or diagrams makes understanding complex topics easier for people, especially students, to understand. However, interpreting scientific data can be the most challenging.

Data visualization helps communicate to us relationships among data with images. After hosting workshops in the past on best practices for data visualizations, Dr. Sally Hamouda, an assistant professor of computer science at Rhode Island College, knows that many Rhode Island teachers struggle to find an effective data visualization tool to use in classroom activities.

Sean Khang, a computer science major at RIC, continues work on a free web-based tool, SimpleChartsRI, which helps users create visualizations with various charting options.

“I took on creating a sample page for their website just to make it easier. And I grabbed data from different SURF research projects and then I pasted that into the website,” he says of SimpleChartsRI, which was created by Dr. Hamouda’s students - Matthew Spaulding and Samantha Palacio - last summer.

In the beginning of the program, Sean was responsible for translating various links sent to him by Dr. Hamouda and organizing information into datasets on the website.

“I would get a bunch of tasks from my mentor,” he says. “For example, if she were to say grab data for health, I would go online and look up the CDC or something similar and grab important data. Then I would update the code for the whole website. So I just get small tasks to update the website.”

The webpage is set up with categories pertaining to previous summer SURF research projects. Users have the ability to choose their own data where they can pick pre-existing sample datasets, upload their own file or create their own data. They then can determine how they want to view their data and customize it to their liking.

“So for example, a user can click if they want a bar chart," says Sean. "This is really simple because they can change the chart title, x-axis label and y-axis label. You can also change the different color schemes."

The SURF program caught Sean’s interest after Dr. Hamouda, his advisor at RIC, mentioned it to him.

“Computer Science is very broad and you can use it in many different ways," says Sean. "I didn't really know what to do with this and Dr. Hamouda suggested that I apply to this program. I’m a very visual person so being able to see the backend of how websites are created is really interesting to me."

In the technology world, there are tons of software that have their own “language”. For Sean, being a CS major helped him with his proficiency in software programs used in back-end projects including video games and apps such as Java and Python. However, his research under Dr. Hamouda centers on web development, which requires different programming skills.

“When I first started, I honestly didn’t know much about the language I was using for coding, so that includes HTML, CSS and JavaScript,” he says. “I honestly didn’t know how to do any of it. I had to watch Youtube videos, like a 10-hour Youtube video. So I think just getting started was a huge challenge.”

As a media team leader at his local church, Sean hopes to incorporate the skills that he has learned from SURF to his youth group and ministry. Towards the end of the program, Sean conducted a workshop to help teach high school students about the website and the project that he has been working on for the past 10 weeks.

“I would continue on the web development path because I found this very interesting and more concrete than the back-end coding,” says Sean. “ When you grab data, you want to show it in a certain light. If I worked for a company and they wanted to show their improvements, I would be able to do so through these data visualization tools.”

This story was written by Ciara French, a 2021 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF) for the Rhode Island Consortium for Coastal Ecology Assessment, Innovation, and Modeling. She is a rising senior at the University of Rhode Island, majoring in biomedical engineering.