What is the role of statistics? Is it to confuse people or to make information more accessible to them? A fun exercise for children answers this question for us and quite beautifully at that. The exercise is discussed in detail on the website tesconnect.com.
Data handling projects
So often, when an academic year reaches its curtain-time, teachers pull masterstrokes out of their sleeves to keep the crowd coming. Sometimes, these turn out to be data handling projects and at other times statistical questionnaires. The exercise discussed on the website is being given the name “the average student”.
10 categories to evaluate the “average student” profile
It is a fairly simple exercise with plenty of ‘take homes’. To begin, children from a class should be divided into groups and each group needs to ponder over 10 categories which define an average student.
The categories can be as elementary as ‘hair colour’ and ‘height’ and can get as specific as ‘hours of Facebook usage’, ‘favourite television show’ or ‘career choices’.
Questionnaires
Based on the categories, each group is expected to create a questionnaire. Yes, things can get a bit chaotic at this stage when each student group has to field questions from another in order to make data collection possible.
Making huge data easily readable
Students can decide to process the collected data in whichever manner they desire. The exercise talks about poster presentations, with an aim to suggest how an average student looks like. It is such a winning idea, after all, to collect huge data sets and present them in easily decipherable forms.
Excel Spreadsheet
An Excel Spreadsheet can come handy in helping children absorb and relay statistical information better.
You can read the original article here.
Brain relays visual information better
In my opinion, poster presentations are visual in nature and thus they pique human curiosity more easily. At the same time, they also do the explanation bit better because visual information is soaked more easily by our brain.
The role of statistics is to evaluate and impart information in an intelligent yet interactive way. Such fun exercise ideas fulfil two goals.
1) They beautifully create (and assimilate) data to construct a particular category (for instance, “average student”) and 2) They provide a fun route to overbearing statistical data.
Do you remember a task where you treated statistical data collection in an amusing way?
