I saw this neat project from Mads Bahrami shared by the Wolfram twitter account last week:
My younger son had thought it would be neat to see how the map looked scaled by population, so I spent a little bit of time trying to figure out how to do that. I’m a total novice when it comes to using Mathematica, but I was able to figure out how to make the new presentation for my son last night.
We started our project today by looking at the original map that Bahrami made:
Next we took a look at Bahrami’s code. The goal here wasn’t to understand the details, but rather to see that making a visualization like this in Mathematica is actually not nearly as hard as it seems . . . if you know what you are doing!
Finally, we took a look at Bahrami’s map scaled by county population. I didn’t do as good a job with the colors as I should have – the darkest colors are 3 cases per 1,000 people in the county. Still, it was interesting to hear what the boys thought of this map vs the original one.
Even though fully understanding the underlying code is a but much to ask for kids in a 30 min project, I think Mads Bahrami’s project is a great one for kids to see. It give kids a chance to see how data visualizations are done, and also gives them an opportunity to understand and talk about the data. I really like sharing this project with my kids.
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