Context
Students often struggle to see the relevance of statistics and data analysis. This activity helps them connect math to everyday life by exploring real-world topics that matter to them. This can be any topic from budgeting, to tracking plant growth, to screen time, to things around the school.
Preparation and Flow
Introduce the idea/activating scaffolds
- Ask students where they encounter math around them
- Show quick examples e.g. tracking steps, sleep, time taken to get somewhere, budgeting
Plan, Collect, and Visualize (35m)
Students work in groups (2-3) They can decide on a data set (e.g. their screen time, or different things around the school if time permits). Consider assigning students a general topic to start exploring such as “finance” or “technology usage”.
Bring the data into Numbers to create graphs and charts to explore the data
Students can add images, labels, titles, and formatting
Share Insights (10m) - Students can record a quick video 3-minute sharing the insights they’ve learnt from the data
Possible Extension
Create a Keynote presentation
Turn the data into a Keynote presentation
Create a Survey
If conducted over a few days, encourage students to create a survey to ask their friends to collect data around them
Explore Graph Information
Discuss and explore outlier points, misleading / unreliable data sources, and bias in the data.
From the LearnGrowCreate Team
Main author: Jia Chen
Attach up to 5 files which will be available for other members to download.