Conditional Formatting Fun with Google Sheets! #gafe

Back in the day, I was a typing teacher. Around holidays we would sometimes do the "Typing Mysteries" where you had to spacebar so many times and then type certain letters to create "art" (ASCII art, they call it now).

In preparing for my Google Sheets session later this week, I decided to come up with a fun way to reinforce two spreadsheet concepts-- cell references and conditional formatting. This, a pixel art constructed from conditional formatting was born!

I think students (especially middle level) would love doing this for each other. They'd need to create a legend/key for their colors (and since I wasn't sure what I was making, I have colors I don't need so if they plan further ahead, they won't need extras) and set conditional formatting for the entire spreadsheet (range 1:1000) to have that condition with that text AND fill color. In the example at right, notice I have a pale green text and fill color when the cells are equal to 10. You do this so the numbers won't show up.

Then, create the artwork! Instead of using a fill bucket and trying to click over and over, you simply type in the number for your color. I find it easiest to make the key in the first column next to the row number to keep it straight when trying to create-->

You will also need to resize the columns so they are squares, like pixels. Press the button at the intersection of the rows and columns to select all, and then drag one cell and it will resize them all. Like this:

The "mystery" page for this sheet is here! You could do this with Excel as well, but I used Google Sheets. I think it would work best in a classroom if they created their own, wrote/typed the instructions, and then switched and read it aloud to a classmate. It's easier to do if someone reads the input to you (and makes them talk to each other!).