What can you say about the child who will be first on the playground tomorrow morning at breaktime in your school?
What statements can you make about the car that passes the school gates at 11am on Monday? How will you come up with statements and test your ideas?
Investigate how avalanches occur and how they can be controlled
The Olympic flame toured the UK, the Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey between 19 May and 27 July 2012. It was claimed that it would come within 10 miles of 95% of the population of these areas.
Was this true? Did it pass 10 miles or less from where you live?
Use the Getting to the Point tool at Sport at School to find out.
We want you to help us find out how good that 95% estimate actually is. When you've found out your distance from the route, vote in our poll (below). You'll then see what the results are looking like - so far, it seems that a little more than three quarters of us live within 10 miles of the route, which means that almost a quarter of us don't. But as our sample grows, this may change ...
Of course, it may be that you're more likely to vote in this poll if you think you're not in the 95%. What effect do you think this will have on the reliability of the result? Do you think that the way we asked the question might affect whether people are likely to respond or not?
Collect the data for your class.
Click here for a poster of this problem.
Challenging this claim will provide students with an opportunity to check their own distance from the route, then to collect data for the class. This can be compared with data nationally or within a particular region of the UK, using the distance tool for the torch relay on the Sport at School website.
This is an interesting context in which to look at comparing data sets using averages and spread.
"Do you think our class is typical? What sort of different answers do you think classes would get in different schools, rural ones, urban ones, big schools, little schools...?"
There are datasets available from the Sport at School website to follow up on this discussion.
Then collect the data on distances - either as the crow flies or by road - for the class. Then calculate an average (which one?) and a measure of spread (which one?) to characterise the data.
For a different context in which to explore the importance of considering spread as well as average, see How Would You Score It?
Which average should we use? Why?
What are the advantages of using that average? What are the disadvantages?
Is the average enough on its own to tell us all we need to know about our data? Why not?
Which measure of spread should we use (if students know more than one)? Why?
What are the advantages and disadvantages?