2025 Data Viz Champions 

Student Winner: Lauren Hyde - University of Illinois

Americans Value National Parks More than Ever

Description
This set of interactive visualizations shows trends in recreational visitor counts for the most and least popular national parks over the past 30 years, demonstrating that both highly-visited and less-visited parks have seen significant increases in popularity in the past several decades. The radial design shows the yearly fluctuations and growth rates of individual parks while also highlighting the overall growth of each set of parks.

Faculty/Staff Winners: Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider & Louisa Zhang - University of Illinois

Trends in High School GPAs among Incoming Freshman Classes of Big Ten Schools

Description
In Fall 2023, the University of Wisconsin-Madison reported a record 83.8% of their incoming, first-semester freshman class reported an unweighted high school GPA of at least 3.75. Among those students, nearly half (47.8%) of the incoming freshman class reported a perfect 4.00 GPA. Several research papers have studied the multi-decade trend of GPAs increasing over time, but we found no widely available data exploring the impact of the Big Ten. This work explores the first-semester freshman demographics published by all sixteen Big Ten schools.

 Specifically, this work primarily focused on the percentage of students in each freshman class that have a high school GPA of at least 3.75. Nerd out with the data with several interactive visualizations that let you do a deep dive into the high school GPAs of the incoming freshman classes across the Big Ten over the past 20 years!