Year 12 have looked at Ed Hawkins's warming stripes and Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec's Dear Data, and asked what a pattern can say that a chart cannot. Each student downloads the Met Office's monthly rainfall series for their UK region, a year-by-month table of more than 2,200 months since 1836, into Google Sheets and works out each month's difference from the long-term average. They then adapt a p5.js starter sketch so that every month becomes a mark, writing the rules themselves: one student turns each year into a row of twelve tiles running from blue to ochre, another draws wetter months as longer, heavier threads. They run the sketch, rewrite the rules as patterns in the record appear (the wet winter of 2013 to 2014 stands out in the southern regions), and send the final output to a fabric-printing service or screen-print a section of it in the department. Over five lessons the work ends with a printed length of fabric and a sketchbook page explaining how the data becomes marks.
Tools: Google Sheets, p5.js Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.