I thought, what if I did that with the daily temperatures?
So I built a chart.
In a circle, because I loved how that looked.
And, because it was already the fourth, and because I don't actually have an outdoor thermometer to look at, I grabbed some data from the Weather Underground. Which is pretty cool, actually, because that means that I've got the actual high and low for the day, rather than just whatever it is whenever I remember to look at the thermometer. This also meant that I have a range of colors to represent each day, which turns out to be quite striking, even after only a couple of days of data. I got the kids into the project; it totally counts as math!
Each day, I look up the minimum and maximum temperatures for the day (or two) before, and pull out the colors that I've assigned to that range, and blend them into that day's wedge of the pie: low temps are at the center, and I make a gradient to the day's high. It's kind of fun how that's ended up making something of a gradient around the inside and outside of the circle, too. I thought by now we'd been into the reds, but it's been a very wet and cool June: I wore my jacket to church yesterday, which was odd!
I shared my graph back to the Facebook group that I got the idea from, and to my surprise, one of the presenters at the upcoming John Muir Laws conference wanted permission to use my photo to show how data can be used in a nature journal. Cool! (Even more cool: the conference is supposed to be on his YouTube sometime after the fact.) And someone else wanted to share it to another group they're in. And I started thinking: "Wouldn't it be fun if this idea had a hashtag so that we could see each other's ideas, and be inspired some more!"
So, if you like it, and you post something similar, please tag your post, or come drop a comment: I'd love to come see what everybody comes up with!
No comments:
Post a Comment