These days, the world runs on data. In our class, we looked at how data drives geography, moving from creating a very simple graph of earthquakes in Excel to incorporating data into Google Maps and Google Earth. We saw how text data can be separated from its format in order to be read by an aggregator. I think learning how to manipulate data and create databases is an important 21st century skill.

Here’s an example from the real world, aka my own life: As part of the programming I’m doing, I use a lot of comma delimited files, which allow me to quickly populate tables or create merged documents. Formatting becomes important here in terms of learning to escape certain characters and making sure there are enough commas for blank fields, etc. etc. etc. I also had a “Microsoft moment” when we discovered that the reason the csv file couldn’t be read was because its first field was labeled ID and that causes an error message. Since most databases have an autoincrement field as the first field and that field is often called ID, this seemed a bit problematic. But we have discovered that Numbers, the Mac spreadsheet program, has no such problem so we can manipulate the data there.