During the morning of July 31, a dozen students enrolled in Karl Gude’s Illustration and Information Graphics tossed paper airplanes down a 40-foot track.
“We’re going to make a scatter plot,” Scott Hardin, a student of Traverse City Central said of the lesson, which was used as a data collection project. “We were scored based off of distance, accuracy and hang time, and then we can make graphics and illustrations to represent it.”
After the data was collected, the students, with Gude’s instruction, looked at both individual and team scores to determine where the rankings stood based on the measurements they took.
“My plane did a little above average,” Hardin said. “My real enemy was the roof. I think it would have done better if we were outside, but I’m proud.”Gude said the students will now design a graphic and then they will plot the illustration in Adobe Illustrator, an application the class learned to use the previous day.
“We needed to collect some data and information,” Gude said, “so we threw paper planes. You can show a lot of different things with a plane. We could be collecting more serious data, but everything we do can be applied to really issues in real life.”
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