whoknows.ca

My foray into using Google Docs in my math classroom was really well received by my students.  Quick summary of the idea: get students to poll classmates on how much time they spend using various media each week (TV, Internet, gaming), then have them use statistics to make guesses regarding the habits of the entire student population.  I revised the orignal assignment slightly. See the final version here. 

Out of my 52 Math B30 students, 49 polled fellow students and entered the results on our online spreadsheet. This made it simple to calculate the mean, standard deviation, et al for the entire set of data (we had 233 students polled, which is close to half of our school population). Check out the final data set here (Note: this is a non-editable copy.  The students had access to a version they could play around with in order to let them perform whatever tests they wanted to).

Although my students could have done this assignment without using an online spreadsheet, attempting to organize all of the results would have been a lot more time intensive. This way, students were able to sort the data and figure out mean and standard deviation of the genders, all within Google Docs.  This led to some really good answers to my last question on the assignment, which was “Is there a difference between males and females in terms of their gaming habits? Explain in as much detail as you can“. A good number of the students came up with exceptionally good answers for this question, supported with the numbers from our spreadsheet.

I will definitely be doing something like this again next year.

Note: We got into a good discussion about whether the data is normally distributed.  It’s not.  It looks pretty bimodal to me, and we came up with reasons why that might be.

danschellenberg Education, Math, Technology Google, Math, statistics

In the spirit of sharing, here’s a lesson that I’m using with my Math B30 students right now.  We’re working on Data Analysis (Stats), and in particular, the normal distribution and related probabilities.  I was getting a bit tired of the dated examples in the text, so I thought I’d create my own problem with the students.

Each student will do a poll of other students in the school, with each student getting a minimum of 20 results.  The two questions they are asking are:

• how many hours do you watch TV in an average week?
• how many hours are you on the Internet in an average week (surfing, email, IMing, Facebook, YouTube, etc.)?

Each student will then post their results to a Google Docs spreadsheet I set up (one spreadsheet per class, like this one) that anyone can edit (to eliminate the need for them to log in).  After all of the students have added their results to the Google Docs spreadsheet, they can then use the aggregate data to perform the statistical calculations required (z-scores, what these results mean to a school population that we assume is normally distributed).

The handout that I’m giving the kids is available here.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

danschellenberg Uncategorized Google, lesson, Math, statistics, teaching