Data Exercises
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed deficiencies in computer skills and understanding data in schools throughout the country. I developed hybrid in-person and virtual labs using spreadsheets and SQL to allow students to share and edit data.
These exercises allow online students the opportunity to analyze and quantify information present in image data stored online. In-person students participated in the collection of data and posting of image data to the cloud.
1) Hand Sanitizer Lab
During the 2019-2020 school year I taught biotechnology to high school students at a public school in Tempe, AZ. We conducted a study of the efficacy of hand sanitizer at disinfecting a saliva sample on a cotton swab.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
Learn to prepare agar: a growth medium for bacteria essential to research
Study germ theory by conducting research on living organisms
Organize and analyze experimental data
SPREADSHEET INSTRUCTIONS:
In-person students collected saliva samples and cultured them in petri dishes. A control dish had no hand sanitizer applied, while an experimental dish was disinfected with hand sanitizer before application to a petri dish. A third control dish was left untouched.
The below spreadsheet contains all student data, and an automated interface for generating graphs and averages of bacteria expression
- Raw data (images) are contained in tabs labeled with the date of sample collection. A collaborative manual quantification of the number of colonies expressed is conducted next to these images on this tab
- The 'Filtered Data' performs SQL based sorting of the quantification performed on the raw data. A dropdown on the 'Data Analysis' tab chooses which data to quantify
- Averages and graphs are printed on the 'Data Analysis' tab. Filters for experimenter name and dates may be used to compare subsets of data. For example, the effectiveness of Isaac's experiments on all dates may be calculated, and then compared to the group average
