First-year Animations

First, a disclaimer: I can’t imagine this will be interesting to anyone not at Cal Poly. I’m using these blog posts as a way of dumping a bunch of interesting-to-me graphs and visualizations of the behavior of students in our first-year sequence here at Cal Poly.

First, an animation:

path of students through the first year

Using racket and OpenGL, I generated movies showing individual students (each one represented as a blue square) moving through our first-year sequence. This data is based on information about grades earned by students in our courses from Winter 2005 through Winter 2016.

The four columns represent the courses in our first-year sequence: CPE 123, CPE 101, CPE 102, and CPE 103. Note that CPE 123 was not offered before Fall 2010.

Time is represented as time in the animation. That is, the first thing you’ll see is a bunch of students entering the program in 2005. The vertical placement of the dot represents the grade they got in the course (with some noise added to prevent all students from landing on top of each other).

Notice that the reduced size (480p) makes the animation run smoother. You can full-screen it to see it better. There’s also a higher-resolution version that I made, but it looks to me like it doesn’t actually convey any more information.

Finally, I really should figure out how to slap text on the screen as part of an OpenGL animation, so that I can label the thing.