Mashup scenario
Sam* from Whanganui and his school group find the Road Safety Issues factsheet for the Whanganui district in 2003, which shows that 23 per cent of all road crashes in the region were from drivers aged 14 to 19. They look at the main contributing factors for loss of control in crashes, and find that 60 per cent of injury crashes on rural roads involved drivers going round a bend.
Sam’s group think about how they could highlight these points in a new way. They decide to lead a discussion within their school in order to come up with five steps they can all take for safer journeys. They call their idea ‘Don’t go round the bend’ and decide to make a data mashup, presented as an interactive infographic, showing the dangers for young drivers in Whanganui.
They go to NZ Government Datasets and look through the transport category, check out the Ministry of Transport Research and statistics, and the Road Safety Survey Series. They read the column on Data Mashup tools, and find some guides to using Motion Charts on the CoolData Blog and on Gapminder.
Sam’s group creates a Google spreadsheet that is shared with each team member to edit, and they collectively define the fields within it. By combining data from a number of NZTA datasets and using Motion Charts to display it, they are able to show the data in a dynamic new way.
They book a lunchtime lecture where they show their interactive infographic to Year 9-13 students, then lead a discussion on five steps they can all take so they ‘Don’t go round the bend’. Sam films the presentation, publishes it as a podcast on their school blog, and then gets their teacher and principal to sign-off their entry into the NZTA Remix competition.
What five steps would your school come up with?
*Sam and his classmates are fictional characters!
Next: Infographic Scenario