Students will research one of the seven federally recognized tribes of Native Americans in Virginia to identify local features of the land, their language, the region of Virginia where they originally lived, where the tribal lands are today, and how they interacted with their environment. From this research, the student groups will design a visualization of this data using a poster, online design tool, or a presentation. Student groups will present their information to each other, and the classroom will design a chart to find similarities and differences between the tribes.

In this project, students will create artistic data representations, expressive artifacts based on data sets. Before engaging in their own projects, students will briefly research and discuss data-based art making in history and in contemporary times. Then, students will use the remaining 3 instructional days to create their art. The resources below provide support for two kinds of representational projects—data-based music, and data-based visual art on a grid (similar to the weaving art discussed in ECS 1.11-14).

In small groups, students will be assigned two of the first ten amendments and pose the questions, “Which of these two amendments do you think is more important?” and “Why do you believe this?” in a survey of ten classmates. Then they will collect and organize the data electronically to create two visual representations of their information. Students will add their raw data and visualizations to a shared slideshow to present their findings to the class and explain why they chose this particular visualization model and what conclusions they can draw from their survey responses.This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2010256.Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Students analyze a chart with the characteristics of the three colonial regions and determine a better way to visualize the information that shows the similarities and differences between the three.This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2010256.Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Students will gather information regarding the cultural and economic interactions between Europeans and American Indians during Westward Expansion. Students will work in groups to analyze several primary sources and create a visual representation depicting the Native vs. European perspectives of westward expansion. 

In this lesson, students will organize and visualize data from indentured contract databases from virtualjamestown.org in order to come to some conclusions about the characteristics of indentured servants in early colonial America. They will make specific decisions about how to organize the data and how to best visualize the data. They will then use the data to draw conclusions about indentured servants in early colonial Virginia, culminating in a creative journal entry assignment. Additional lessons can have students search for and analyze data on the enslaved Africans of early colonial Virginia in order to compare and contrast the two forms of labor in colonial Virginia.