Vizkidz Founders Liv Buli and Abigail Ricarte. They spend every day thinking about how to best visualize and communicate data to a world of users that don't necessarily know too much about it.
Vizkidz Publishing LLC is co-founded by Filipina-American Designer Abigail Ricarte and Norwegian-American Data Journalist Liv Buli. Together, the pair has created a series of children’s books that illustrate the basic concepts of data visualization, and this morning launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowd-source funding for the initial print, publishing, and distribution of the first book in the series: “Penelope Pie Throws A Pizza Party.”
Learn more about the Vizkidz Team: http://www.vizkidz.rocks/
This is the story of Penelope Pie and her friends, Laney Line, Barnaby Barchart, and Bertie Boxplot.
All of our characters have a singular spirit and set of skills, and we follow their adventures as they each solve a problem. For instance, when Penelope Pie throws a party for her birthday, someone needs to figure out how to divvy up the pizza so each guest can have their favorite topping. Fortunately, Penelope is just the girl for the job!
Through solving these problems, the stories of Penelope and her friends illustrate the basic concepts of data visualization. A pie chart best portrays parts of a whole in context, line graphs – a trend over time, bar charts (often underestimated) allow for categorical comparison, and box plots give us a great sense of how data is distributed. Now the team is launching a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the printing of the first book in the Vizkidz series.
“Our mission is to give kids a head start in understanding how to wrangle data” said Abigail Ricarte, co-founder and lead designer at Vizkidz Publishing LLC. “Big data has become a fundamental concept across a wide swath of industries, from healthcare, to media, even the music industry. Our ‘vizkidz’ will have the advantage of an innate understanding of the fundamentals of data.”
ABOUT VIZKIDZ PUBLISHING
Liv Buli and Abigail Ricarte, a data journalist and product designer who have worked together in the music, tech, and analytics space for many years, spend every day thinking about how to best visualize and communicate data to a world of users that don't necessarily know too much about it.
This experience and background is what leads the pair to believe that teaching data visualization to kids in a fun and engaging way could be truly valuable. Big data has become a key component of most industries, and learning how to interpret and analyze this data early on, will provide children with a significant head start.
Together the pair have created these characters and a world where they explore, solve problems, and overcome challenges that help illustrate how fundamental data visualizations work. The team marries thoughtful design and captivating stories to share a useful message, believing that complex concepts can be communicated in a simple way.
Learn more about VizKidz and support their Kickstarter campaign here