Gapminder

Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global level.

We are going to use Gapminder to explore some complex datasets and discuss ways to engage students with high dimensional information. The goal of this session is to get oriented to the Gapminder resources and think about how it could be used with students. 

Launch Gapminder

 

View the Gapminder QuickStart Guide

 

Activity: 

Working in small groups, choose one of the “Health” variables in Gapminder and explore other factors that may influence that variable. Remember you can limit your work to a small number of countries. What kind of additional information would you need to shift from identifying a correlation to establishing causal relationships? Capture your visualization using the “Share Graph” button and post a short description to the Gapminder forum.

Reporting out and discussion:

We will take a few minutes to share some of our findings and discuss how this resource can be used in classrooms. 

Some of my favorite features -

• animation of changing from linear to log scale on graphs
• population momentum description - http://www.gapminder.org/videos/religions-and-babies/
• access to data behind gapminder display
• sharing graphs 
• making motion charts with R - https://code.google.com/p/google-motion-charts-with-r/