There are many data analysis and charting tools that Excel users should check out to see what is available in the world outside Excel. I’ll be posting about interesting tools that I find and/or readers tell me about. Here’s my first – Tinkerplots
Introduction
Andrew Gellman has a great blog on statistical analysis that I visit. In reading a post on graphic mock ups, I found a comment by Hadley Wickham which mentioned Tinkerplots.
Since Hadley is a leading charts and graphs programmer (ggplot2), I followed his suggestion to check out Tinkerplots.
The University of Amherst Statistics Education Group developed Tinkerplots. Here’s how they describe it:
“Tinkerplots is a software construction set of basic operations (stack, order, separate) that allows students to build their own plots to analyze data. ”
The UMass site has 5 videos that show how Tinkerplots can be used by 4-8th graders to learn data analysis. I encourage you to look at these videos to see what some of our middle and high school students are learning in school and to see what real data visualization tools can do with a few clicks.
While intended as a training tool for students, data visualization software developers may want to try it to learn what kinds of features should be included in a data visualization package. Tinkerplots is available for $89 at this site.
What do you think about Tinkerplots?
Tinkerplots is used in both elementary and high schools with great success. Paired with a Smart Board, tinkerplots inspires students to begin analyzing data.
For a little more depth of understanding Tinkerplots, you might want to read the “Designing a Data Analysis Tool for Learners” paper on our Statistics Education Research Group website. Our experience is that Tinkerplots is a delight for novices in data and visualization, but a bit shocking for those who are highly trained.