cool!” were heard from about half the class. On the other hand, about half the students expressed concerns that the “cool” solution did not seem to provide an illustration of either typicality or spread. The display depicted in Figure 6-11 was deemed even “cooler” but, as more than one classmate noted, did not surrender its design logic readily. It took two full days of discussion before students finally surrendered their focus on novelty of design and gravitated instead toward criteria favoring clarity of the mathematical ideas.

FIGURE 6-10 A data display on a two-dimensional coordinate grid.

FIGURE 6-11 A data display showing median at the apex of a pyramid.