Interactive Online Activities
Individual Lessons
Projects
Lesson and Project Collections
Here are digital teaching resources that demonstrate how data and statistics are
a vital part of learning mathematics in a meaningful context. The resource
activities are often interdisciplinary, which makes them time-consuming to
prepare, as additional expertise is often needed. But the payoffs can be huge:
student engagement, in-depth learning, and a real-world context for learning
mathematics.
The starting point for developing an interdisciplinary activity can be a
teacher's personal interests or a student's passion. Are you a birder or pool
player? Check out the ideas in Classroom FeederWatch, Backyard
Birding--Research Project, or Analyzing Numeric and Geometric Patterns of Paper
Pool below. Or if you want to begin with a simpler data collection lesson, take
a look at Junk Mail below or
Backpack Project.
Another approach is to look at situations in your community or larger world
issues and have the students frame questions to investigate. Students may
develop a passion for scientific inquiry when a topic can be analyzed with
numbers. Requiring quality work and including a component about sharing results
with the community will add value to an interdisciplinary contextual learning
experience. Teachers may want to enlist a science teacher or community person
to provide additional expertise. Whether thinking small activity or big
project, be ready to be surprised at what the data analysis reveals!
Look out, pool sharks! Begin the study of data and statistics with this super
student exploration where data are collected and analyzed while students apply
mathematical topics studied in grades 6 and 7: factors, multiples, rectangles,
and the meaning of being relatively prime. In the Paper Pool applet, a ball is
hit from the lower left-hand corner of a grid-lined pool table at a 45-degree
angle. Students modify the size of the rectangular pool table and observe how
the ball always travels on diagonals of the grid squares. After gathering and
organizing data, students look for patterns to predict the corner pocket into
which a ball will fall and the number of side hits the ball makes as it moves
on the table to a corner pocket. The goal is to determine how the number of
hits, final pocket, and number of squares crossed depend upon the relative
lengths of the sides of the pool table. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? MSP full record
No one is immune from receiving junk mail, but just how much of it is really
finding its way to your address? In this simple activity, data collection and
analysis are a key part of a project to learn about the importance of
recycling. For one week, students count and record the number of pieces of junk
mail received in their homes. The display and organization of the data can be
modified to address the data and statistics topics the class is working on. MSP full record
Just how on-target are those weather forecasters we watch and listen to? In this
webquest, students work in groups to track online weather reports for several
locations over the course of three days and determine the accuracy of
forecasts. Students develop an understanding of how weather can be described by
measurable quantities, such as temperature, wind, and precipitation as they
find and compare weather data found on the Internet, chart and graph data, and
present their conclusions about forecasting. This straight-forward activity is
suitable for students who are just beginning their work with data and
statistics. MSP full record
With this free online collaborative project, students measure the temperature
and record the minutes of sunlight for one week. Data are collected on the web
site, and average daily temperatures and amount of sunlight are compared.
Students draw conclusions about how the distance from the equator influences
temperature. If you like this collaborative project, be sure to check out Down
the Drain: How Much Water Do You Use?, another collaborative data project
from the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education (CIESE).
MSP full record
If ocean travel is your passion, this site offers a way to spend time at sea
without ever leaving your classroom. Here is a science project that uses actual
data to help students investigate the science and history of the Gulf Stream.
Math students can greatly benefit from the opportunity to collect data and draw
conclusions based on the data. In the lesson called Current Now, students use
real-time data and satellite images to determine how the Gulf Stream moves in
the course of a year. In another activity, students use data about water
temperature obtained from ships and buoys to determine the course of the Gulf
Stream.
MSP full record
Be part of an annual event: Enroll your class in this free Internet-based
collaborative project. Students discover which factors--room temperature,
elevation, volume of water, or heating device--have the greatest influence on
boiling point. Students boil water, record their data, and send it via email to
be included in the site's database of results. Student activities focus on
analyzing the compiled data to find answers to questions about how and why
water boils. MSP full record
Birds are everywhere, and here are ideas for creating a data collection project.
Work with a science teacher and, possibly, an industrial tech teacher to expand
this multiweek activity into a cross-curricular project to help students see
how data analysis can support an understanding of nature.
MSP full record
These nine online lesson/activities investigate population growth and its
impacts. Students use archived census and demographic data from the U.S. Census
Bureau to model population growth and examine how population change affects the
environment. Teachers will want to carefully review this resource to choose the
activities most appropriate for their students' mathematics background. Linear,
quadratic, and exponential functions are used in some lessons. MSP full record
For this online data collection project, students monitor and report the number
and type of animals killed by motor vehicles in their locale, along with
information about the environmental conditions that may have contributed to an
animal's death. The RoadKill Monitoring Project's goal is to make students
aware of the environmental issues related to the death of wildlife on
roads--the statistics are considered evidence of the conflict between humans
and wildlife. Teachers can use the data to teach ecological principles, to
portray information graphically, and to develop elementary concepts in
statistical analysis. MSP full record
The Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens
Institute of Technology develops free standards-based projects that offer
real-time data found on the Internet and online collaborative projects linking
classrooms from around the world. There are opportunities for cross-curricular
activities and for rich experiences with data collection, data display, and for
drawing conclusions or inferences based on the data. The Global Sun Temperature
Project and the Gulf Stream Voyage highlighted above are two examples of this
site's materials. MSP full record
What better way to make data and statistics lessons real than to use the daily
newspaper? Here are interdisciplinary lesson materials based on New York Times
articles. The stories offer ways to draw on real-world issues and statistics to
develop lessons in mathematics. For example, in one lesson, "students convert
statistics about gun injuries into visual presentations, then use these as the
basis for a poster campaign to teach children about the dangers of guns in
home," while another lesson idea involves analyzing the job market for older
workers. MSP full record
This unit contains seven lessons with hands-on learning activities to help
students explore statistics and probability. The lessons, designed for
mentoring situations, may also be helpful to teachers new to teaching data and
statistics. Each lesson features an overview of the mathematics, preparation
guidelines, teaching tips, and suggestions for how to use each activity to
develop specific mathematics concepts. Statistics activities focus on posing
questions, gathering data and identifying bias, understanding measures of
central tendency, representing data with graphs, and interpreting data. MSP full record
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Copyright
June 2005 — The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work
supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0424671. Any
opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this
material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of
the National Science Foundation.
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This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
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