Avatar Maker · Adventure 1
Avatar Maker
A 4-day Adventure where students turn their name and interests into a data-driven avatar.
The 4 lessons
Lesson 1: Making Avatars for the Dataverse
Students enter the Dataverse, learn how personal information becomes data, and build a paper avatar from their name and interests.
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Lesson 2: The Data Dojo
Students explore what counts as data and sort cat data cards across three rounds — reading dot plots, bar charts, and heatmaps and describing center and range.
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Lesson 3: Restoring the Dataverse
Working in pairs across two days, students explore four lands of the online Dataverse to analyze avatar and identity data — building heat maps and bar graphs and reasoning about identity, sampling, and fairness.
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Lesson 4: Hero's Journey
Students reflect on their growth across the Data Adventure and tell their experience as a Hero's Journey story — in paper or digital form — connecting it to the Data Habits of Mind, data skills, and their STEM identity.
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The arc
Avatar Maker is the entry point to the Dataverse. Students begin by discovering that data can represent who we are and tell meaningful stories. They collect data about themselves and transform it into a unique avatar that becomes their identity in the Dataverse.
From there, students shift from creating data to making sense of it. Across four lessons they identify data types, describe patterns using measures such as mean, mode, and range, and create visual representations to share what they find. The Adventure concludes with a data story that reflects what students learned about themselves, their classmates, and the power of data.
The four lessons
- Lesson 1: Making Avatars for the Dataverse (in class, no devices). Students enter the Dataverse, learn what an avatar is, and build a paper avatar from their name and interests.
- Lesson 2: The Data Dojo (in class). Students explore what counts as data and sort cat data cards across three rounds to read dot plots, bar charts, and heatmaps and describe center and range.
- Lesson 3: Restoring the Dataverse (in class + online, ~90 min across two days). Working in pairs in the online Dataverse, students explore four lands — building heat maps and bar graphs and reasoning about sampling and fairness — from the class’s avatar data.
- Lesson 4: Hero’s Journey (in class). Students reflect on their growth through a Hero’s Journey storytelling frame — on paper or as a digital slideshow — and connect their learning to the Data Habits of Mind and STEM identity.
Materials you’ll need across the unit
- Printed Data Case Cards and Avatar Build Cards (Lesson 1)
- Avatar Maker Stencil Set, stickers, googly eyes (Lesson 1)
- Slide decks for each lesson
- The Data Habits of Mind poster (used throughout)
- Student devices for Lessons 3 and 4