Friday, 10 August 2012

Some Olympics

My year 9s are beginning data, and I thought we might try to find some graphs about the Olympics to interpret, so I googled "Olympics graphs" and came up with some fun things.

Olympic Records - Match graphs of Olympic records over time to the sport they represent. They suggested giving the list of sports as a "possible support" but I think that I would do that for all but the best classes. My year 9s tried this today and needed a lot of support on top of that. Still I think for those that did engage it was interesting and it enabled us to talk about measurement units and data trends. It would be a really cool activity with a higher-achieving class.

Graph the Olympics - A great idea for Olympics lead-up time especially, so a bit late for us, and again one best suited to a higher-achieving class or higher-year class. Lots of deep understanding possible in deciding how to best make predictions, which data to use, which measures to use etc. If I'm teaching in another 4 years, I'll try to remember this!

Olympic Logic Problems - Actually there are a lot of links here (in fact it's largely a list of the resources at nrich.maths.org), including to the Olympic Records activity above, but the ones I like best are the logic problem ones. I'm setting some for year 7s weekend homework menu this weekend.

And for a bit of a laugh, here are some graphs:
(although the comments make a point, the Venn diagram is off)

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