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Energy Data Visualization for Students
For Parents and Participants
Designing Your Energy Lifestyle: Data Thinking—Data Visualization is an online course created by researchers at Stanford University and Oregon State University for middle and early high school youth. The program offers students the chance to gain valuable skills using data visualization tools and to save household energy.
Students learn about energy data and data visualization, practice creating household visualizations with Tableau (a popular software tool), create a story around those visualizations, and present a portfolio of these visualizations in the context of a household energy conservation.
Interested parents of Fremont junior high and high school students should send an email to Dr. June Flora and our team at: kyen-project@stanford.edu.
Examples of Student-Created Energy Tools
Check out some of the videos created by our student interns for the program:
“Appliances Speak Out,” a stop motion video produced, scripted, and created by Veena Arunkumar and Lily Qu.
Help your family prepare for saving energy with “Discover Your Readiness to Save,” an online tool designed and written by KYEN student Kamala Katta.
Program Goals
Designing Your Energy Lifestyle is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. The program, based on theories of behavior change from the fields of psychology and public health, aims to increase energy data literacy in students while building knowledge and promoting household energy savings.
Specific learning objectives include:
- To understand concepts from data visualization (for example: cleaning, chart selection, storytelling) and energy data analytics (for example: load shape, peak load, base load, time-of-use pricing)
- To become facile with Tableau as a data visualization tool
- To create visualizations of a month of household energy data
- To collect and analyze data about household energy-consuming activities
- To link energy-consuming activities (i.e., cooking dinner) to energy usage (in kilowatt-hours)
- To produce a story of household energy consumption
- To develop a household energy conservation plan
Participants learn how to upload hourly data about their household’s energy use from their local utility into Tableau, clean the data, create visualizations and interpret those visualizations by asking questions of the data and reporting household energy consumption insights. By the end of the program, participants use Tableau to produce their own personalized visualizations of their household’s energy use.
