Educational tips about the pictograph webpage
The Pictograph webpage was written for Primary School children, aged 7-11, although other ages may find it useful. It is an interactive webpage. This means that you can make it do things on the screen. Click here to find out more about this.
A pictograph, or pictogram, is a simple graph using small pictures to represent the points rather than dots or lines.
This webpage allows you to build up a simple pictograph on the screen. You can choose the pictures, and set the scale. You can even change the scale while keeping the same data. There are several different ways of entering the same data.
The webpage is not intended for serious use. It only has a maximum ten lines and a maximum of ten units for each line. However, a graph can be set up very quickly. You can alter the scale without having to re-enter the data, so you can explore what effect different scales have. There is a good choice of supplied pictures and colours, which children might find fun! This means that it is suitable for introducing children to the ideas of graphs.
There are several ways of entering data.
- The easiest way is just to click at the end of the line that you want. (To try this out, click anywhere in the big white square!) This will draw a line of the current picture and colour. It also displays the value of that number at the end of the line. If you want a different value on that line, just click somewhere else.
- If you prefer, you can click on all the squares you want, one at a time, starting at the left-hand end. This has the same effect, but children may prefer counting as they click. Don't click too quickly, Let one appear before clicking for the next.
- Click on the - button at the start of the line, or the + button at the end, to get less or more pictures on that line. This uses pictures which are the same as the rest of the line, rather than the current picture and colour. However, if you delete the whole line, it then switches to the current picture if you increase it again. You are not allowed to increase past the end of the line, or reduce it to less than zero (obviously!) The value gets displayed similarly to clicking directly on the squares.
- You can type a number directly into the value box. If this line has some pictures on it, then the new value will use the same type of picture. If it's a new line, it will take the current picture.
You can select different pictures and colours. There will always only be one type of picture on one line, but you can have different pictures or colours on different lines. If you don't like the picture on a line, then change the current picture and colour to one you like, and click again on the line in the right place to change the pictures.
You can the scale by altering the "Each picture is worth:" box. By doing this, you may mess up the pictograph. You could have too many pictures to fit on a line. If this happens, the value box shows the right value, there will be ten pictures, plus a little arrow to show overflow. You could have a scale which makes all lines just have one or no pictures. This is what will display, with the values, again, still containing the correct value. If you change the scale back to a better value, then the proper number of pictures will appear again. You can't have fractions of pictures, so if you choose a scale of "2", then 4 and 5 will both show 2 pictures (since it can't show 2.5 pictures to represent 5). Again, changing the scale will make the correct number of pictures to reappear.
If you increase or decrease a line, it uses steps according to the scale. So adding one more when the scale is "100" means that the value goes up to the next 100, rather than just adding 1. If you increase or decrease a number with an overflow on it, it resets the line to its maximum value (which will be less than its overflow value).
There are boxes provided to type in descriptions of each line. These don't do anything, but will help you see what you are doing! It will also look better if you print out the page. (The easiest way of doing this is just to use the Print button to print out the webpage.)
Ideas for using the Pictograph webpage
First, you must find some data. For young children, try to find data which contains whole numbers, not too big (preferably less than 10). The obvious place to start is the children themselves. They could count how many come to school by coach, or by car, or walking, for example. Or you could find out who has a birthday in winter, spring, summer or autumn (fall), and add those up. You could count how many children have different types of pets. You could also use other types of data, such as temperature measurements, if they are within a reasonable range. I would advise that the teacher tries making a graph surreptitiously first, with the data, to make sure that it makes a good graph!
Now let the children choose the pictures. They could choose the same picture for the whole pictograph, with different colours on each line. They could choose different pictures for each line. Should the pictures be relevant? (Is this possible?) They could, of course, use the same picture and colour throughout, but my guess is that they'll think that's boring!
They should type some rough description in for each line, so it makes more sense. Once the graph is complete, they should look at it, and work out what it means. Which line is longest? Why? Unfortunately for simple data, it is hard to think of questions which aren't obvious to at least some of the children. Perhaps it would be better to split the children into groups. Each one could make up their own graph and print it out. Then they could swap their graphs, and have to answer questions about someone else's graph.
Once they understand a graph with a scale of 1, change the scale to 2. They should be able to see that the graph is roughly the same "shape". They can also see that you can put in bigger numbers. After playing around with scales more than 1, try a scale less than 1.
The block picture is different from all the others, since it produces a solid block of colour rather than separate pictures. This can be used to introduce the idea of more sophisticated graphs, such as line graphs.
You will probably find the limitations of this webpage fairly quickly. The children can then move onto using a spreadsheet and make "proper" graphs. Or if they wish to stay with pictographs, then they can draw their own!
My name is Jo Edkins - index to all my websites - any questions or comments,
email jo.edkins.pictograph@gwydir.demon.co.uk
© Jo Edkins 2005