Forge Spring 2021 Showcase Winner: “Education and Health: Spending vs. Outcomes”
Each semester, Forge hosts a showcase to let Forge students show what they were able to create in their Skills Courses by displaying their final projects. This year, voting on the Forge Spring Showcase was open to the public, and the overall Forge winner was Anna Grace Calhoun’s data visualization project from Envision, entitled “Education and Health: Spending vs. Outcomes”. To help you get to know Anna Grace and her project a little better, I sat down with her this week to hear her thoughts on her experiences with Envision, with Forge in general, and specifically with creating her outstanding project! Read below to find out more.
Tell me a bit about yourself!
“My name is Anna Grace Calhoun. I’m a second year majoring in Computer Science and Public Policy and Leadership and minoring in Economics. At UVA, I’m very involved in Forge and Student Council, where I’m on the Legislative Affairs Agency and work to increase student civic engagement and lobby on behalf of the student body. I’m really interested in how data science can be leveraged to improve policy design and evaluation. I love to read, do art, run, listen to podcasts, and cook!”
What is your history with Forge?
“My first semester at UVA, I took Node, Forge’s data science course, which gave me a great foundation in data analysis and visualization. My favorite part of the class was how project-based it was — I did a project analyzing socioeconomic factors of economic mobility in the US. The next semester, I was a PC for Node and got to help teach other students. I really enjoyed teaching, but I also felt like there was a need for more opportunities at Forge for course graduates to use their skills to do cool projects after finishing their class. My former Node instructor, Ben Artuso, had just started running the Impact program, where students did pro bono projects for nonprofits and CIOs, so I got involved leading data Impact projects and am now an Impact Director! It’s been really fun to see students get to learn and collaborate while working on awesome projects related to subjects they’re passionate about. I’m also from Charlottesville, so it means a lot to me to be able to give back to organizations that are working to make our community more equitable and sustainable.”
What was your favorite thing about Envision?
“Envision teaches D3, a Javascript package for creating interactive data visualizations. D3 is so addicting because you can really do anything with it and you’re coding something that you can immediately see and engage with. There are so many options, allowing for a lot of creativity. Besides D3 just being awesome, I really appreciated how my Envision instructors (shoutout Ben and Izzy!!) used examples and discussions to teach about data responsibility in such a meaningful way, covering topics like race consciousness and gender parity in data visualizations.”
Tell me about the project you created.
“For our final projects, we made interactive data visualization sites. My project focuses on how government spending relates to education and health outcomes. This is a very high-level overview, and honestly part of my goal was to show that looking at broad and non-localized metrics like funding almost always isn’t enough to help us understand complicated systems like public primary education and healthcare. However, because government spending has been rising globally, I was genuinely curious to see how spending in a specific category translates to results. In the future, I’d like to add more social services categories and see how their funding and outcomes are interrelated.”
Where did you get your inspiration to do this project?
“For the visualizations themselves, I drew a lot of inspiration from Gapminder and Our World in Data which both do interesting graphs related to global social and economic trends. In terms of the subject matter, policy design and analysis always involve discussions of costs vs. benefits, so I wanted to demonstrate actual costs vs. benefits (again at a very zoomed out scale) in two critical sectors: education and health.”
Challenging and Enjoyable parts of project:
“One challenging part of the project was figuring out how to have the data transition across time. I had to do a lot of experimentation before I got the slider and play button to work! One thing I also struggled with and still think I could improve was contextualizing and highlighting important aspects of the data, because framing and context is so important in determining what people actually take away from a data visualization. My favorite part of the project was just seeing the graphs come together and slowly adding more features to bring them to life. I have no graphic design experience, so I also had fun looking at other sites for inspiration and trying different layouts and colors to style the page.”
