Google sheets pixel art is my new favorite digital learning tool! But it is seriously a pain to set up. It took me about 15 hours to create my template, but now that I have it, I’m totally entranced. It’s super engaging, and it has a bunch of teaching and learning benefits.
What is Pixel Art?
Pixel art is kind of like pointillism, but in a more digital sense. Small squares are colored, and each of the little boxes doesn’t mean much individually. But when zoomed out, all of the pixel boxes together create an image. “Traditional” Google sheets pixel art for digital learning has academic questions in a Google sheet. As students answer questions correctly, a series of conditional formatting rules color in the cells (converted to squares) to create a drawing.
I was in honors art in 8th grade (neither me nor my students can figure that one out). But my skills didn’t really grow with me. In fact they’ve probably declined over the years. So me, with my fourth grade art skills, really doesn’t have much a knack for creating pixel art activities for my students in the traditional sense. There are some template services out there, but I’ve never attempted. Instead, my pixel art activities uncover a secret image.
Pixel Art and Student Engagement
The reason students love the Google sheets pixel art is because it’s so fun! My students are learning really stuff tough chemistry content each day. And at least 50% of the time, they are doing that from home with who knows what distractions. After staring at a computer screen all day long, answering question after question, uncovering a secret image is fun! In my pixel art, there are 64 boxes that must be uncovered to reveal the secret image. The kids are constantly in my Google meetings chat talking about what they think the secret image is. It makes my teacher heart glow.
Benefits of Answer Verification in Google Sheets
The reasons I love using Google Sheets for distance learning is the answer verification aspect. This year I am teaching in a hybrid model. Half of my students are in person, and the other half are live stream at home. I always do what I can to help my students learn, but they can be at home with their siblings, or with parents working from home. There’s really no telling what kind of distractions my students are dealing with when they learn from home. With answer verification, my students at home will have the opportunity to assess their own learning.
Parents also enjoy the answer verification that Google Sheets provides. They know exactly what, if and how much their child learned from their lesson that day. This is especially true because I teach chemistry. This isn’t like second grade math that basically everyone knows. Chemistry is mostly specialized, and I wouldn’t expect parents to know everything that I teach to a depth that they can help their kids at home.
Answer verification makes it nearly instantaneous for me to grade these assignments. I can also gauge how well my students are learning at a glance. When the students are working I can easily jump into their Google Sheets to see their progress. If you’re super interested in “not actually having to grade stuff” hacks, you can check out this blog post about how I use Google Forms in my classroom.
My Pixel Art Activities for Chemistry
I’ve been creating these Google sheets pixel art activities for primarily math topics within chemistry. I find that this helps my students evaluate their answers and check for significant figures (which they need help with). I’ve branched out to using these Google Sheets activities with other questions as well. I recently did it for physical and chemical changes and properties. On the whole, I wouldn’t say I liked one type more than the other. I have so much fun creating them and sharing them with my students is always a blast. You can check out my collection of Google Sheets pixel art activities for chemistry here.
Conditional Formatting in Google Sheets
So you’re interested in setting up a Pixel Art on your own? Or perhaps it’s just that you’re really not interested in grading and want to program a spreadsheet to do it for you? Even better, you need to set up some kind of grade book or progress tracker for your students? Don’t worry, teach! I got you!
Let’s start simple. My first conditional formatting experience was for tracking the number of labs my students completed in a school year. They have to complete so many to qualify to take the state final exam. I’d give each student a row in the spreadsheet and give them a “90” for each lab they finished. This was based on the number of minutes the lab took to complete. Once the total was greater than or equal to 1200 the cell that was calculating the total turned green. When it came time to yell at students for being behind on labs, I’d simply yell at all the “non green” kids.
- Populate the spreadsheet using names and assignments.
- Make sure to create a column to calculate the total. Use a format like this: “=sum(B3:E3)” This tells the cell to calculate the total for all of the cells in that range from B3 to E3.
- You can then click the little blue box in the lower left corner and drag it down the column to apply the same rule to each row.
- Highlight the cells that you’d like to apply the conditional formatting rule to. Select “Format” and “Conditional Formatting.” Then set up your formatting rule. I have mine set to fill the cell green when the number is greater than or equal to 270.
- Set up another rule within the spreadsheet to help you catch zeros or failing grades. Highlight the cells you’d like the rule to apply to and again, select “Format” and “Conditional Formatting.” For the picture below, I chose “Less than or Equal to” and set the value for 45.
Conditional Formatting for Assessment
Now to use this tactic with assessment is a bit trickier, but still doable. You’d just write a question for your students to answer. There needs to be a very specific, non negotiable answer for this to work. Provide a place for them to write their answer. In the answer cell, set up a conditional formatting rule to indicate the specific answer. You can set this up so that it is text using the “text is exactly” rule. I suggest this one because otherwise, they can have a partial answer and still get “credit.” Numeric answers are the easiest, using the “is equal to” or “is between” if you’d like to account for rounding errors.
For the image below I programmed each individual answer cell. I set “text is exactly” input the correct answer as the first rule. Those were coded to turn green. I set a second rule “text does not contain” and the correct answer. Those turn red. This can give you some problems. For the second question (in row three), I could have submitted “40” and not been marked wrong. I also would not have been marked right. The cell would have stayed white. Since the correct answer is 4, and the wrong answer submitted has a four in it, the spreadsheet doesn’t know to make it wrong. Currently, there is no way to set the cell to “text is 100% not ___.” When that feature arises, I may just be the happiest woman on Earth.
Going all in on full on pixel art is going to a huge challenger for a beginner. Like I said, it took me around 15 hours to get my template down for my pixel art and I’m pretty strong in my spreadsheet skills. I’d start with building a basic template that will color code the answers the kids submit. As mentioned earlier, it has tons of benefits for your remote kids that can’t have constant contact with you to get their questions answered.
