Charts for school
Three jobs come up every term. The tool is free, nothing is uploaded, and the explanation panel writes the first draft of the caption.
A science fair experiment
Put what you changed in the first number column and what you measured in the second: plant height by days of light, bounce height by drop height, score by hours studied. Each row is one trial, with a short label. Use the scatter chart. The panel gives r, the correlation: close to 1 or −1 is a strong straight-line relationship, close to 0 is none. Write the caption as what you saw, not what you hoped: "Plants given more light grew taller; r = 0.91 across 8 trials."
If you repeated each setting several times, average the repeats first and chart the averages. Say how many repeats went into each point.
Class grades
One row per student (or per class, if you're comparing classes), one score each. Bars, with the highest highlighted. Student names are categories, so the panel skips "trend" and gives the class average, the median, how many scored above average and the spread. If the average and median differ a lot, one or two scores are pulling the average; the panel names scores that stand out.
For privacy, replace names with initials or numbers before you share the chart. The image you download contains whatever labels you typed.
A weekly log
Minutes read per day, laps per practice, temperature at noon. Rows in order (Mon to Sun, Week 1 to Week 8), a line chart, and the trend line on. The panel reports the change from first to last and the direction. For a total that builds up, like pages read so far, use the area chart.
Writing the caption
- Say what the chart shows and over what: "Test scores for 10 students, period 3."
- Give the one figure that matters: the average, the correlation, or the change.
- Add one limit: how many points, or what wasn't measured.
The explanation panel's text is a starting point. Copy it, cut what you don't need, and keep it under three sentences.