Resumen
As the first step upon commencing an in-depth data mining analysis, students should become intimately acquainted with the data under study. In this paper, we present a methodology and set of custom tools that we have designed and developed for use in our data mining courses that allows students to efficiently and effectively accomplish this task. The tools create interactive visual presentations of the data, encouraging students to explore the data in search of patterns or relationships that would then be investigated in subsequent steps using sophisticated statistical and machine learning tools.