Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Found an interesting learning tool - World Average Life Expectancy Calculator Tool on Google Tool site today. It is done in Flash and shows you different nation's average life expectancy over the last 30 years (data up to 2004). Here are a few things you might want to pay attention to:

- All dots in charts are color coded according to geographical regions world wide: North/South America, Europe, Arabic, Africa, and Asia Pacific. Selecting the colors (simply move your mouse over the geographical regions) on the mini world map will make all the dots (countries) in the region blink for easier visual.

- The timeline bar at the bottom allows you to slide the time back and forth between the year 1975 to 2004. You can see the change of a nation's life expectancy vs income per capita on a yearly basis.

- Select the specific country you are looking for on the right hand side, simply check mark the boxes beside the country names.

- There are a few drop down menus in this tool, the one on the left hand side, allows you to change the indicators of the data (regions, income groups, military budget...)

- Notice the size of the dots also changes, which indicates the population growth I believe. Select the Map tag on the top to see the countries in a larger world map and slide the years to see the population changes. You can use the low right hand corner slider bar to emphasize on the population changes (increase the diameter of the dots).

- The zoom function allows one to zoom into a particular region or zoom out. Very handy when you want to view a particular group of data and analyze them.

- Select a country (or multiple, by clicking on the dots), then slide the timeline, you will see a line drown to display the changes of the selected data group.

My limited knowledge allows me to appreciate the tool from various of angles:

-Life expectancy and political instability: you can easily see a country's expectancy drops if there was a war or major political instability. The dots moves rapidly up and down (eg. South Africa, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Namibia)

- Economical Growth: associated with political changes or natural resources. (eg. China, Russian Federation, Equatorial Guinea)

-Population growth (eg. China, India)

- Internet Users per 1000 people: note how the color of China changed from yellow to orange-red in just 3 years between 2000 to 2004

Anyway, it's not just a simple world average life expectancy calculator. It's a tool that got a huge potential to collect, display, analyze world wide statistics for education purposes. Maybe that's why Google includs it in its collection of tools. Try it out yourself!

World Life Expectancy Calculator Tool