I've started playing around with Flash. It's still pretty rough.
There's two views of the data - one is in a list form, and the other is in map form.
In list form, I think types of data should be able to be turned on and off via some control. On the map, I was thinking that data would pop up as you mouse over an image, along with the name of the school.
I'm not sure I'm going to show anything besides gender split, religious or not, size of school, and (for the map) location. Those seem to be the most interesting and relevant things.
The circles aren't exactly proportional, because the schools vary in size from 350 to 20,000, but hopefully they still give the user a decent feel for the relative sizes. I know this list page is really ugly, not sure what to do about it. The circles are kind of unwieldy.
Does the rainbow/anti-rainbow make sense? If you didn't know what this project was about, could you figure it out from that first page?
Right now, the only buttons that work are those in the upper left hand corner.
If you have Flash 9, you can check out what I have so far at : http://jackieweber.net/Flash.html
Thanks!