Representation

One of the most memorable parts of our in class assignments throughout the past semester have been the theme of “show, don’t tell” and this theme were used quite heavily as the semester wore on. This reoccurring theme has helped me greatly in understanding how audiences react and respond to your work and research. Not only were these assignments fairly difficult for me due to my lacking knowledge of Google sheets and Microsoft excel, but they were also a ton of fun to do because most the time it meant gathering the data in class, and you never know what you may learn from the data collecting process. One of my favorite assignments in this category was the Regression assignment in which we questioned our classmates on a number of different lifestyle and personal history questions to get a certain profile for each person, then convert all of that information to a spread sheet where we could properly display the data and mix and match what kinds of things correlate to each other based off the many profiles we got from our classmates. By doing so we could be able to make assumptions and predictions to trends and habits of our class. Another fun assignment was taking data from the Beta Test by polling our peers, who played our serious game, for feedback and any other comments in which they may have for my group. We were then able to make graphs to visually show the most popular feedback and trends to properly improve the game play. One of the most odd graphic visualizations we were able to make for the class was the Team Demographics through the concentric circle graph. By taking the research we did on census data, we were able to make this really cool representation of this concentric circle graph. Prior to this class I had never seen anything ever represented like this, but after a brief explanation it made more sense. But the design in itself is definitely something you don’t see very often just out and about on any normal given day. But it does make a neat twist on representation to show the narrowing of a certain group, in this case the group was population ranging from the general United States all the was down to a properly researched estimate of the population of fifteen to seventeen year old teenagers living within Butte County. But by being able to take this knowledge of “show, don’t tell”, I am much better equipped to present data and information much more professionally and am much more affluent in my methods of presentation.