Saturday, March 2 1:45-2:45pm
School of Data 2019 Galvanize - New York 303 Spring Street New York, NY 10013
In this session attendees compete in a fun and interactive card-based game to tell the best stories using data from NYC’s Open Data Portal.
Open data is an incredible resource, however many New Yorkers haven’t realized its potential because they either aren’t aware it exists or they don’t feel comfortable putting it into action. We invite New Yorkers— students, design agencies and design-centric companies, library staff, educators, NYC, government staff, journalists, non-profit employees, storytellers, advocates and activists—to discover how to turn data points into compelling stories and insight, and spark curiosity for taking action with open data in everyday life.
Developed by Meag Doherty as a Mozilla Foundation Open Leaders initiative, and modeled after “Cards Against Humanity,” this game was created as a data literacy tool to empower anyone who thinks they’re “not good at numbers” to seek out percentages and decimal points with ease and get the hang of using them to tell great data-driven stories. Read more about Meag’s process developing the game in this Medium article.
The game is played in multiple rounds and requires two decks of cards placed at the center of the playing space: prompt cards (P) and data cards (D). Players take turns being “data czar” each round. To begin, each player draws 7 cards. Anoint a data Czar for round #1 (the person with the most recent birthday goes first) The Data Czar draws a P card and reads the prompt out loud ("Tell me a story about [...]") The other players respond to the prompt (fill in the blank(s), answer the question, etc) by selecting a card(s) from their hand and passing face-down to the Data Czar. Once all responses have been collected, the Data Czar shuffles them and reads each response aloud (re-reading the prompt), then chooses the response that tells the most compelling story about New York City, according to his/her own judgement. Whosever response is chosen, wins and collects their submitted card(s). At the end of each round, a new player becomes Data Czar and everyone draws back up to 3 D cards. The player who collects the most cards by the end of the game, wins!
Card content will be seeded with data and topics from datasets available on NYC’s Open Data Portal (we will select these and prep cards in advance of the workshop). A portion of the cards will be left blank in order to seed new content from players during the workshop.
(15 min) The session will kick of with an intro and an ice-breaker. (30 min) Then we’ll break out into groups of 4-6 and begin game play.