Daphne Draws Data: Teaching Kids Bar Charts With Crayons
At the 2024 AI Connect K-12 Data Science Conference, Storytelling with Data CEO Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic previewed her children's book. She read its opening, used crayons to explain bar charts and shared an "eat a rainbow" activity.
By The AI Enterprise Magazine Team3 min read
Key takeaways
- A story makes graphs approachable. Daphne, a drawing dragon, uses a graph to find a banana thief.
- Shared baselines aid comparison. Knaflic said our eyes are good at comparing items lined up at the same place.
- Crayons become a bar chart. Axes, labels and a title turn physical objects into a chart.
- Try "eat a rainbow." Kids chart the colors of food they eat in a day.
- Book due September 4. A companion site offers worksheets and teacher and parent support.
At the 2024 AI Connect K-12 Data Science Conference, a virtual event held July 25, 2024, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, CEO of Storytelling with Data, previewed her first children's book, "Daphne Draws Data: A Storytelling with Data Adventure." Knaflic, who has written three business books about using numbers and words together to communicate at work, said this one is for kids.
She read the opening pages aloud, then used a box of crayons to explain how bar charts work and offered an at-home activity.
What is "Daphne Draws Data" about?
The book follows Daphne, a dragon who loves to draw and enjoys turning numbers into graphs to answer questions and help others. Her older brother tells her dragons do not do data. She leaves her cave to find a place where she can be herself, and in a jungle she meets monkeys whose bananas keep disappearing.
Daphne counts the banana peels under five trees, then draws the data. She sets a key in which one drawing stands for five peels, so the tree with 30 peels gets six drawings. Reading the finished graph, she and the monkeys see which tree has the most peels, and that is where the problem is.
Knaflic framed the lesson simply: drawing the data was fun for Daphne, and it also helped her learn something new.
How do crayons explain bar charts?
Knaflic then moved to a hands-on demonstration. A single crayon shows how much is left to use. Add a second, and a viewer can compare their heights and colors. Add more, and the pattern holds with seven crayons.
The reason it works, she said, is that the crayons line up at the same place, like the stacks of banana drawings. "Our eyes are really good at making comparisons" when items share a baseline, she said.
What are the parts of a bar chart?
Knaflic built a chart from the crayons step by step. She added a horizontal x-axis for categories such as color, a vertical y-axis labeled in centimeters (the tallest crayon was almost 8 cm), and axis labels and a title. Then she drew rectangles over the crayons and removed the crayons, leaving a bar chart.
From the chart, viewers could see where there was more of something, where there was less and how the bars compare. She added that bars can also be compared with a goal. If the goal were to use up a whole box of crayons at an even rate, she said, a child should color with the tall crayons and rest the short orange one.
She pointed out that Daphne's banana graph was also a bar chart. "If a dragon can draw data, you certainly can too," she said.
What activity can kids try at home?
Knaflic's activity is called "eat a rainbow." Children note the primary color of everything they eat in a day, count foods by color (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white and brown), and draw a bar chart in a notebook. The chart can then answer questions: whether they ate from every color, which colors were most common and which were missing.
She said printable worksheets, coloring sheets, step-by-step instructions for drawing Daphne and a bar chart, and support for teachers and parents are available on the book's companion website.
When does the book come out?
Knaflic said the book was due out September 4, with an electronic version available earlier through the companion site, plus giveaways and additional activities.
More ways to learn about data
AI Connect has 24 free live webinars on its 2027 schedule in four series: AI × Enterprise Panel Series, AI Demo Days, Agentic AI Showcases and Plug & Play Series. Registration for 2027 events is coming soon; see /webinars/.
Frequently asked questions
How do you teach kids to read a bar chart?
Knaflic lined up crayons by height to show comparisons, then added axes, labels and a title and replaced the crayons with bars.
What is the eat a rainbow activity?
Kids note the color of each food they eat in a day, count foods by color and draw a bar chart to see which colors were common or missing.
What is Daphne Draws Data?
It is Knaflic's children's book, subtitled A Storytelling with Data Adventure, about a dragon who draws graphs. She said it was due out September 4.
This article is based on remarks by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, CEO, Storytelling with Data at AI Connect K-12 Data Science Conference 2024 on July 25, 2024. More coverage: More AI Connect Events.
Filed under: People, Culture & Leadership, AI Use Cases & Applications
