Homework 3: Multivariate Data Analysis with Tableau

Assigned: Sep 22, 2011
Due: Oct 6, 2011 before 11:59pm

Description

This assignment is based on a "Visualize This" challenge from Nathan Yau's Flowing Data blog.

Nathan found data from the National Center for Education Statistics (see Data Sets section) and was interested in determining if states with high student/teacher ratios had low SAT scores. He developed a visualization based on the data and described his questions in a post, Class Size and SAT Scores By State.

About a week later, he decided to turn the problem over to his readers, issuing a "Visualize This" challenge.

Your assignment is to take the challenge and develop an interactive Tableau dashboard (with multiple graphs, if needed) that allows the user to explore the data. Don't forget to look in the data for additional factors that might affect SAT scores and/or education quality. Be creative.

Create a webpage that embeds your dashboard. On this webpage, provide a short write-up about the visualization and what insights you discovered from exploring the data. What is the message that you are trying to present to the user?

Do not read the comments to either blog post or check the forum until after you have completed the assignment.

Data Sets

Data source: National Center for Education Statistics

Submission

Embed your Tableau dashboard on a webpage (in your cs.odu.edu account is fine) and submit the URL.

Note: We'll look at your submissions in class on Oct 13.

Notes

You will need to sign up for a free account at Tableau Public.
Creating interactive vis with Tableau Public - http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/how-it-works
Once you've created your dashboard in Tableau Desktop, save it to the web using File > Tableau Public > Save to Web...
Click the Share link (when viewing the dashboard online) to get the HTML embed code for your webpage.

Grading

As with most of these assignments, grading is subjective. But, I'm looking for interesting visualizations that tell a story. I'll also look in particular at the effectiveness and design aspects of your dashboard and the degree of interactivity and ability for user to explore the data. I will also evaluate the quality of your description of the dashboard and the insights you gained.