With seven teams, 50+ real-time visualizations, and a room of supportive audience members, VIZ’d 2025 marked one of our strongest events yet!

A Data Challenge

This year’s challenge centered on American Ninja Warrior competitor performance data- an energetic, narrative-rich dataset that pushed teams to balance clarity and storytelling. 

To make things even more exciting, VIZ’d borrowed structure from the popular cooking competition show Chopped, splitting the challenge into two timed rounds:

  • Round 1: The “Appetizer” Visualizations
    • Teams had just minutes to create a visualization slide deck on obstacle and player data. Participants made punchy, clear, and fun design choices with visualizations like map plots, pie charts, and more.
  • Round 2: The “Main Course” Visualizations
    • A longer, more substantial visualization round where teams produced narrative-driven graphs and plots that told American Ninja Warrior stories through data. Python and Tableau were prominent tools used throughout the challenge to produce visualizations.

This two-course, interactive format created a dynamic rhythm throughout the night, with audience members cheering and voting teams on in-between submissions.

The Winning Team

We’re excited to congratulate this year’s winning team: The QMSS Quokkas! The team consisted of current QMSS students Maya Khadr, Akita Kotian, and Juhi Pawar. 

Their visualizations stood out for their clarity and creative use of the dataset provided. The Quokkas’ Main Course round focused on analyzing the difference between male and female American Ninja Warriors’ outcomes for various obstacles.

Honorable Mentions

The Super Electric Legendary Coders team finished in 2nd place after finishing in 1st place following Round 1.

The Elephants rounded out the podium in 3rd place. This is the second podium finish for one member of The Elephans, Andres Arnold, who was on the winning team in VIZ'd 2024!

All of our competing teams did a fantastic job with their visualizations and storytelling! Shoutout to the rest of our competing teams: Control + Alt + Delicious, The Social Scientists, Vizzy Wizzy, and RD^2!

QMSS Talent and Community

Beyond the competition, VIZ’d highlighted what makes the QMSS community unique:

  • Teamwork: Students divided roles, worked together, and iterated design processes under time constraints.
  • Creativity: Teams visualized performances, obstacles, and patterns in their own unique and varying ways.
  • Technical Skill: Charts and plots built quickly using tools like Python and Tableau emphasize the transferable skills learned in QMSS courses.
  • Community Spirit: An outstanding turnout that led to a student-filled room, with support and votes from the audience and hard work and skill from the team members.

During our competition, current U-M and QMSS students and faculty made up our live voting audience. Just like America Ninja Warrior competitions, our audience members had the chance to cheer on and support their favorite teams by making their own signs. The signs were ranked by the QMSS Peer Mentors, and several audience members got to go home with door prizes for being creative and supportive with their work!

Looking Ahead 

Thank you to all the students, faculty, and staff who brought VIZ’d 2025 to life. The excitement in the room reflects the strength of the QMSS community and our commitment to hands-on, collaborative, and real-world data learning.

We’re already looking forward to VIZ’d 2026- and to seeing what next year’s competitors will create!

Special Thanks

QMSS would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth (Beth Ann) Whitaker for designing and MC-ing this year’s VIZ’d competition as well as QMSS Peer Mentors Tess and Bella who assisted Dr. Whitaker and the whole Peer Mentor team with planning, logistics, and ideas to keep our audience members entertained throughout the event. Collectively, this year’s VIZ’d competition couldn’t have been successful without Dr. Whitaker and our entire Peer Mentor team this semester: Tess, Bella, Leila, Maddie, and Lindsey!