Making Art Using Google Sheets

Middle Schools Students were introduced to conditional formatting on spreadsheets during Library Media this week - a lesson from Google for Education's Applied Digital Skills. This free online curriculum offers a series of self-paced videos teaching about basic digital skills and features of Google products. As a class, we completed "Make Art with Google Sheets." Students chose an image to replicate, assigned cell and text colors to specific values with conditional formatting rules, and voila - pixel art! Students were evaluated on the following skills: 

• I gave my spreadsheet a title.
• I resized all the cells to form a square grid.
• I searched for and selected an image to replicate OR created my own pixel art design.
• I used CONDITIONAL FORMATTING rules to assign a color to each number in my spreadsheet. (This changed how cells appear when values (#'s) meet certain conditions.)
• I assigned a formatting rule to a cell ("when the value is equal to ... 1, 2, etc.)
• I selected a fill color for that value.
• I repeated this process for several (more than two) rules/colors. 
• I adjusted the text color to match the fill color to hide the numbers in my image. 
• I removed gridlines from my spreadsheet. 

This is what projects looked like prior to changing the text color and removing grid lines. 

I was absolutely blown away by some of our student's creations! Here are just a few of their projects.