Oh Sheets!

They say “a picture is worth a thousand words.” This old adage can also be applied to scientific data tables, graphs and infographics. Have you ever sat in on a lab meeting where the scientists were discussing an intriguing figure? They could go on for hours and hours! The ability to show results in a clear and engaging way is an important skill. Most 7th grade students are beginners at using any spreadsheet, such as Google Sheets, to collect and analyze data. In this lesson, students will be given human population and global climate change data to analyze in Google Sheets by writing formulas. This lesson is a good fit for middle school students who are new to writing equations in spreadsheets. My research at Stanford this summer will explore methods of manipulating Python for better data analysis. My goal is to bring relevant ‘real-world’ data analysis skills into the science classroom via spreadsheets..