This book covers an immense range of the kinds of data that we ‘store’. The authors spent a year sending each other weekly, themed postcards. These contained not words, but pictorial representations of the data they had collected.

In one week, for instance, the topic was the number of times they checked their phone. In week 15 it was how many compliments they had received and given. Week 24 saw them looking at doors.

The book has several merits. First, it provides ideas about the kinds of things that constitute ‘data’: pretty much anything. Secondly, it illustrates how data can be represented and how much information a key can contain: the section on doors shows what kind of door was encountered where, and who opened it. Thirdly, it suggests a question to explore with your students: how might you convert that to something a computer would understand?

This article was originally published in Teach Secondary magazine in 2016.