(Manually) making letters with geom_path() – fun example

Disclaimer, maybe the title should be ‘lame example’.

Nothing overly exciting here. Just posting cause it took a little faffing about and someone else might like the idea. At my work (research institute) we (the social club committee) were organising an ‘Olympics event’ with a bunch of task for teams of 4, with a loose research theme. I thought a graphing race could work, and was trying think how it could be made a little more fun than drawing a line.

I figured I’d need to give the teams axis with the right scales on, as well as the sheet of data, so it would only be a 3-5 minute task, not a 30 minute task. So I figured I’d throw it together in the graphing package we love to hate, ggplot.

Code to produce this is here.

The idea was that they’d get the blank plots and data, draw the points, work out how to join them properly to form the letters, then guess what the letters are to reveal the word. I had em in a different order for the actual competition.

No, you can not have that 120 seconds of your life back, sorry 🙂