In an ideal world, you start by asking: What question am I helping to answer? Then you go out and locate the most appropriate data available to help you answer that question and, because it is an ideal world, exactly the data you need is already there. It’s squeaky clean and accessible, just waiting to be visualized.

In the real world, data availability is often the limiting factor. You therefore start with the data you have and try to discover what questions it might help answer. If any of the question/answer combinations you discover end up engaging your curiosity, then you have a candidate for a visualization.

Such was the case with this competition. We poured through the available Alberta data sets looking for something that was interesting (engagement value) and relevant (societal value). Eventually we landed on the high school grades data.

Next we needed to define our audience. It’s easy to fall into the trap of defining an overly broad audience (e.g. the General Public). I mean, it’s on the Internet, right? The whole world is your audience. But there is a paradox: the more narrow your focus, the more engaging your application. We therefore defined our target user as “parents of children about to enter high school”. The application will answer some questions well rather than many questions poorly.

It’s also important to recognize the limitations of the data. Our audience's question might be "what is the best school for my child?" Our data can only answer "How do schools' grades compare?" There are a host of education quality concerns that aren't addressed by our data (e.g. the socio-economic status of the students, opportunities outside the classroom, etc.). And there are likely biases in the data collection (e.g. teaching to the test, cheating, small sample-size schools, or inconsistent grading criteria). But what we do have (average grade by school and subject) is still valuable.

As an aside, our visualization doesn't make claims it cannot possibly deliver on. Headlines like Find the Best School in Alberta or Where Do Schools Suck the Most? may pull in more hits on Reddit, but would be a disservice to the users of this tool and the teachers and institutions reported on. The socio-economic factors likely dominate any straight school-to-school comparison. Nevertheless, a more nuanced exploration reveals some interesting gems.

Students across the province seem to struggle with English more than the other subjects. Or perhaps English grading standards are higher.