Wednesday 29 February 2012

Speed Data Collection

I'm conscious of the time that it is, and how long my day has been, but this is just designed to be a quick one.

I've been half-following #sendGoveyourtimesheet on Twitter this week, and had a very short count up of my working hours this week. 7.30 - 16.30 on Monday (2 hours in the evening), 7.30 - 16.30 on Tuesday (1 hour in the evening), 7.30 - 19.30 today (parents' evening) is already 30 hours - do I now work 2.5 more hours this week and call it a day?

The thing I wanted to post about was inspired by this post. I wish I'd bulled it up a lot more now, as this was very good and very useful and could've been a lot more fun than it was.
In order to give a little more value to representing data to my Year 8 class I had them collect data about themselves. I could've done this as homework, but decided to finish an activity off today and follow it up with speed data collection.

It's very similar to speed dating - set the tables up so that they're somewhat circular, and set the kids up so that they're facing one another. I prepared 15 questions - one with a lot of answers, and one with yes or no - and gave each pair the same question to start with. On my whistle (one lesson of PE per week!), pupils began and on my second whistle, moved one seat to their right, taking their question and asking the next person. I stopped them at different times to check they all had the right number of data points and they stopped when they returned back to their original date. This meant that all of the insides had asked all of the outsides, all of the insides had asked the outsides and that the two sheets were so easy to collect and collate.
Get the tables back to how they were supposed to be, and we're away with 30 data sets with results from the class. Ace!

Bar charts, frequency diagrams, pie charts and scatter diagrams here we come...

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