The Youth Community Informatics project now offers a free tool to create a radar plot for visualizing the strengths of an inquiry unit. The basic version is built on the Inquiry Cycle.

There are a variety of possible uses:

• to show how different inquiry units emphasize different aspects of the Cycle. For example, an otherwise good unit might offer little in the way of Discuss (or collaboration). That might be fine if other units do emphasize collaboration, or it might indicate that some modification is needed to include that.
• to compare across sites or projects.
• to portray the development of a single site over time.
• to support development of inquiry units.

The scoring of units could be done by researchers, teachers or youth leaders, community leaders, or community members.

None of these uses are a substitute for detailed analysis, but they can help start an investigation of the units.

The basic version of the tool, shown here, simply provides a single radar plot, with a logarithmic scale of arbitrary magnitude. Other versions might support overlays, color-coding, additional axes, or other features.