Data Visualization: High School Education

thingiverse

This is my assignment for Mathematics through 3D printing at George Mason University. My assignment was to create a Data Visualization of a topic that interests me. I decided to work with the data I found for high school graduation, by state, because I am pursuing a graduate degree in secondary education and wanted to take a deeper look at these statistics to better understand where key issue areas are for graduation rates in the Continental United States. So, for this assignment I used Mathematica to create my visualization model that I will describe a little more in detail. As you can see from the picture, I used all the information available from Mathematica to help me visualize it via a state mapping. The first thing I did was to get the polygons of all the Continental United States and then I gathered all the educational data from all 48 Continental United States. I then used QuantityMagnitute to just have the numerical values. By doing this, it helped me get the numerical values to a much manageable value. Then I added the prism, which was provided by the professor in one of the examples. The Graphics3D, I got help by one of the lab assistants and she explained to me the reasoning behind the i and j. The i is the state and the j is the numerical value of the states graduation rate. After running the code we can then see the the picture that we get and it shows the extrusions of each state according to their graduation rate. This assignment was very personal, since my graduate degree is in secondary education and the success of secondary kids is essential to that. This gave me a perspective of the success, as well as the setbacks that still need to be addressed in the education field to make sure that every student that is in the education system makes it through the finish line.