Data Kidz Example: Line Charts

I was listening to a podcast the other day on my daily exercise run and it started talking about Animal Crossing (a game that launched on the Nintendo Switch a few weeks back) and it described it as possibly one of the most important games of all time. It described it as a game that, at this very moment, has the potential to save lives and help with people’s mental wellbeing.

For those not in the know, Animal Crossing is a life simulation where you move to a new island and start a new life, making friends, catching fish, planting flowers and generally enjoy being outside. Especially at the moment it is extremely refreshing and gives you a different world to live in that is pleasant and rewarding. For our family while being stuck indoors we have invested a lot of time into our island paradise and has brought us substantial joy at a time when we all need it.

So how does this link to data visualisation?

One of the in-game loops is the idea of the ‘Stalk Market’. On a Sunday morning, a small orange Boar named Daisy Mae turns up selling turnips for a set price. And then throughout the week, Timmy and Tommy Nook, who are a couple of Racoons that run the local shop, (stick with me) will then buy Turnips off you for a set price. They change their prices each day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. And if you fail to sell your turnips by midnight on Saturday they rot and you’re left with nothing.

This loop has taught our children about the concept of “buy low and sell high”, but we’ve also taken the opportunity to learn about line charts at the same time. 

As per Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s book “Storytelling with Data”, line graphs are most commonly used to plot continuous data. Because the points are physically connected via the line, it implies a connection between the points. Often, our continuous data is in some unit of time: days, months, quarters, or years

We decided a line chart was perfect for tracking the daily movements of Turnip Prices so we could compare how much we paid for turnips against what we could sell them for on any given day to make a profit.

We plotted the daily ‘sale’ price in blue and then the weekly ‘buy’ price with orange. After tracking prices for a few weeks the chart isn’t perfect:

1. The scale isn’t great on the y axis (more complicated but a logarithmic scale could have been better),
2. and I think there could be a better way of plotting the Daisy-Mae prices so it is easier to see what is higher or lower each day.

However, having said that, it has been a great opportunity to introduce the kids to the concept of a line chart and plotting a continuous series over time. 

Now, back to panicking over the 180,000 turnips I’m currently sat on waiting to trade…