Winners of the 4th European Statistical Competition are announced!

Over 11,000 students from 16 European countries signed up for the fourth edition of the European Statistics Competition (ESC). The ESC is a competition organized by Eurostat and volunteering National Statistical Institutes addressed to secondary education students with the purpose of encouraging students to get familiar with statistics and official statistical sources.

This year 61 teams participated in the European finals where they prepared a video on the topic »Information and disinformation: Official statistics in world overflowing with data«. Teams were very creative and demonstrated the importance of official statistical data in everyday life in various ways.

A jury of European experts selected the top five videos in both the age group 14–16 (category B) and the age group 16–18 (category A). The winners of each category will receive their prize at a virtual award ceremony that will take place on 16 June 2021.

Winning team Category A: VERDE (Portugal)

Other finalist teams Category A:

• MARIE (Belgium)
• STATHLETES (Croatia)
• PLAN_XY (Slovenia)
• STATS A-ALPEON (Ireland)

Winning team Category B: TEGLZAROŽE (Slovenia)

Other finalist teams Category B:

• LUSITANOS (Portugal)
• GIMNACK21 (Croatia)
• AEROSTATS (France)
• ESPRO (Cyprus)

Congratulations to all winning teams and their menthors!

Heroes of Slovenia

My colleagues published the Slovene multi-player statistical quiz app on Tuesday 22nd. I love it!

We’ve all heard “statistics is boring”, but once you add lovely design, humorous content and a strategic game to it, it can be fun. In two days after the announcement there are more than 1200 players who already played abt. 24.000 games. And we know a lot more about Slovenia than we knew three days ago 😉

How the game works: First one selects his player name, then a favourite character (a hero from Slovenia), turns the wheel of fortune (automatic selection of the region one plays for) and then looks for an opponent (a region or a player). Each game has 7 questions, the last one always being a number range slider (statistical data). The one who wins gets some resources and so each region gradually evolves from the prehistory to the future. The competiton of the 12 regions lasts for 7 days, then the game resets to the starting point (keeping the overall score board of players).

In the current version we have about 2000 questions, 500 of these are statistical (others include interesting info about local peculiarities, history, literature, language, geography …).

At the moment there is the Slovene version only, but the App is ready to be translated or adjusted for another country (if adjusting you’d have to invest also into some graphic design adjustments). I sincerely hope we’d make an English version of the Slovene game someday, for our foreign visitors or fans of Slovenia 😉

Website announcement:  https://lnkd.in/gg3byB9

Game website: http://junaki-slovenije.si/

FB page: https://www.facebook.com/JunakiSlovenije

Developer: http://proxima.si/sl/project/junaki-slovenije

 

 

IMAODBC 2016: And the winner is…

The Best Presentation Award of the International Marketing and Output Database Conference IMAODBC 2016 in Gozd Martuljek, Slovenia goes to Susanne Hagenkort-Rieger and her team from DESTATIS (Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany).

In her presentation Susanne highlighted the importance of web search statistics  and why intuition when emphasizing selected statistical data is often not sufficient. To achieve relevance and accessibility of most popular statistical data we should not ignore what the web search data say.

Presentation is available at the IMAODBC 2016 website…

A few facts about IMAODBC 2016 as presented in the second best presentation by Corey Jenkins, USDA – Foreign Agricultural Service, U.S.A.:

 

 

EU Energy Data Visualisation

Last week I attended a meeting on user support at Eurostat and we’ve seen a presentation of a cute tool which was developed during the “Eurostat Hackday”. No, this was not an excercise on how to hack the Eurostat website to jeopardize EU statistics dissemination. It was an Open Knowledge Foundation initiative to build some tools with available EU data without any pre-defined guidelines for developers. The event was supported by Eurostat (but only after overcoming the fear of being hacked ;-)) and was organized on 16th December 2010 (see the website for more information).

On one hand I find the tool very appealing from visual and content point of view, on another it demonstrates the opportunities of making data publicly available and promoting cooperation with universities and independant developers.

You can click on the picture to open the tool or read more on it’s background on the Open Knowledge Foundation Blog.

Enjoy 🙂

“Surfing with Ed” on the waves of WordPress

There is a new WordPress blog dedicated to statistical websites: Our colleague Ed Swires-Hennessy is continuing his periodical reviews of statistical websites in a blog form (http://surfingwithed.wordpress.com).

I see his reviews as a valuable source of information on web usability from a user’s point of view. His original website includes reviews since 1998 and for some of those the websites have changed already. You can check those by using the Wayback Machine.

Happy surfing 🙂

 

“Tourist Maps” of statistics on Slovenia

In Slovenia we’ve recently published the Interactive Statistical Atlas of Slovenia – an online tool for presenting statistical data on maps. It was basically developed for “tourists” (less experienced users), to help them view regional statistical data in a clear and easily understood way.

Demo: Population ageing in Slovenia

You can enter the application from the entry page.

The application was developed in cooperation with Monolit and Mapping Worlds. From the project leader point of view I can say the most challenging task was to keep it simple. That said, I’d like to thank Mapping Worlds for their fruitful cooperation and willingness to share their experiences and knowledge.

We are quite happy with the first version of the product and there are already plans how to improve its content and features. Last but not least, we’ve already received some positive feedback from Slovene bloggers, here my favourite one is translated from Slovenian:

Blog entry about the Atlas (translated from Slovenian)