As a social studies teacher I am supposed to help students learn to gain information from charts and graphs. The land-speed record history seems designed to make such teaching useless. As near as I can tell records are marked with appropriate information buried in groups with an assort number of circles that indicate absolutely nothing. Why not just list the records and let it go. It is difficult to convince kids that charts and graphs convey information if the ones in their paper does not.

Hi Sally,
Can i suggest you take a look at the Bloodhound website, there is allot of education material there.

Jules

Sally,

Thanks for commenting on my News Illustrated page on the Bloodhound car. I really appreciate people who have a passion for visuals (charts, graphs, diagrams and the like) as much as I do.

I only wanted to show the number of records per year and every 100 mph milestone in the land speed history chart. By doing it this way, the chart shows that there were a lot more records broken early on, but as the speed gets higher the record gets tougher to break as the years go on.

Your suggestion for a text list is a good one in some cases, but our space is very limited. To list all of these records in text would have taken up a large amount of space. If the main focus of the page were on the past records, the design would have been much different. More emphasis on the past record-breaking cars and people. However, the focus of my page was on this particular car and team. The records were very secondary to the story. I just wanted to give people and idea of how far this record goes back and how many times it has been broken.

I hope this explains it.

Thanks again for your comment.