Earlier today I was looking for a dataset that I could use in a new data visualization tool that I’m testing out. That quest took to me the website of the U.S. Census Bureau. It was there that I went down a rabbit hole of looking at data. Eventually, I stumbled into a mapping tool that the U.S. Census Bureau hosts. 

At Data.Census.gov you can find, read, and analyze data sets. Beyond that you can filter data sets and even create custom maps of the data sets. I lost at least an hour of my day messing about with the mapping tool. 

Watch this short video to see how you can map census data at data.census.gov. 

Applications for Education

One of the many ways that students could use this mapping tool is to create comparisons of educational, economic, and demographic data according to state and or region. Those comparisons could then be the impetus for research into what accounts for state or regional differences in the data.