Revisiting Mads Bahrami’s corona virus mapping project with the boys

Back in May, Mads Bahrami made a terrific map of how the corona virus spread in the US:

County by county spread of COVID-19 across the US over the course of 100 days. Check out the Wolfram Language code Mads Bahrami used here: https://t.co/OmyQQuv3Ix #DataViz pic.twitter.com/a173Bvg7Fh

— Wolfram (@WolframResearch) May 11, 2020

We did a project based on Bahrami’s work back then:

https://mikesmathpage.wordpress.com/2020/05/17/sharing-mads-bahramis-project-on-how-the-corona-virus-spread-through-the-us-with-kids/

and today seemed like a good day to revisit it. This project needs Mathematica to do yourself, but I think it is also really interesting to hear what the kids have to say about the maps.

Here’s their first reaction to an animation showing total (population adjusted) cases in the US over time:

I wasn’t happy with the color scheme I chose for the first map, so the main work we did for the project today was making a new map with an improved color scheme. That work required us to look carefully at the data and study the distribution of the population weighted counts by US county. Here’s the new map and how the boys described that work:

This project was a nice way for kids to think about how to present and interpret data. Thanks to Mads Bahrami and to Wolfram for making the original work public.

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