Teach Engineering
Household Energy Conservation and Efficiency
Are your household devices eating up a lot of energy? Pupils investigate household energy efficiency through a set of activities. They find ways to improve energy efficiency and reduce consumption. This is the 21st installment of a...
Teach Engineering
Balsa Glider Competition
Change one variable and try again. Teams build basic balsa gliders and collect data on their flight distances and times. Through collaboration, the team decides on two modifications to make to the basic design and collect data for the...
Teach Engineering
What a Drag!
Stop and drop what is in your hand! Pupils investigate how form effects drag in the 12th part of a 22-part unit on aviation. Groups create equally weighted objects and determine which one falls the fastest by collecting data.
Shodor Education Foundation
Plop It!
Build upon and stack up data to get the complete picture. Using the applet, pupils build bar graphs. As the bar graph builds, the interactive graphically displays the mean, median, and mode. Learners finish by exploring the changes in...
CK-12 Foundation
Mode: Kittens
It is not as difficult as herding cats. The short interactive provides a group of kittens to sort according to their colors. Pupils determine the mode of the number of kittens by color. The questions continue with other numbers of...
CK-12 Foundation
Mode: Mucho Money
Generate stacks of money. Given bills of different denominations, pupils stack them based on their values. The learners figure out which value is the mode of the data and determine whether the data is unimodal, bimodal, or multimodal.
CK-12 Foundation
Mode: Boxes of Oranges
See how your data stacks up. Pupils stack crates of oranges in increasing order, creating a simple bar graph. Using the graph, individuals determine measures of center and describe the shape of the distribution. Scholars determine what...
CK-12 Foundation
Mean: Harmonic Mean
Let the means live in harmony. With lengths representing the values of a small data set, learners compare the arithmetic mean to the harmonic mean. The pupils determine which value is the most accurate representation of the average of...
CK-12 Foundation
Mean: Arithmetic Mean
How is a mean affected by changes in data? A well-designed animation allows individuals to manipulate data and watch the effect on the mean. Challenge questions help guide users to conclusions about outliers and skew within data.
Education Development Center
Creating Data Sets from Statistical Measures
Explore the measures of central tendency through a challenging task. Given values for the mean, median, mode, and range, collaborative groups create a set of data that would produce those values. They then critique other answers and...
Education Development Center
Choosing Samples
What makes a good sample? Your classes collaborate to answer this question through a task involving areas of rectangles. Given a set of 100 rectangles, they sample a set of five rectangles to estimate the average area of the figures. The...
EngageNY
Describing the Center of a Distribution Using the Median
Find the point that splits the data. The lesson presents to scholars the definition of the median through a teacher-led discussion. The pupils use data lists and dot plots to determine the median in sets with even and odd number of data...
EngageNY
The Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD)
Is there a way to measure variability? The ninth resource in a series of 22 introduces mean absolute deviation, a measure of variability. Pupils learn how to determine the measure based upon its name, then they use the mean absolute...
EngageNY
Presenting a Summary of a Statistical Project
Based upon the statistics, this is what it means. The last lesson in a series of 22 has pupils present the findings from their statistical projects. The scholars discuss the four-step process used to complete the project of their...
EngageNY
Summarizing a Data Distribution by Describing Center, Variability, and Shape
Put those numbers to work by completing a statistical study! Pupils finish the last two steps in a statistical study by summarizing data with displays and numerical summaries. Individuals use the summaries to answer the statistical...
EngageNY
Describing Center, Variability, and Shape of a Data Distribution from a Graphical Representation
What is the typical length of a yellow perch? Pupils analyze a histogram of lengths for a sample of yellow perch from the Great Lakes. They determine which measures of center and variability are best to use based upon the shape of the...
EngageNY
Comparing Data Distributions
Box in the similarities and differences. The 19th lesson in a unit of 22 presents class members with multiple box plots to compare. Learners use their understanding of five-number summaries and box plots to find similarities and...
EngageNY
Connecting Graphical Representations and Numerical Summaries
Which graph belongs to which summary statistics? Class members build upon their knowledge of data displays and numerical summaries to connect the two. Pupils make connections between different graphical displays of the same data in the...
EngageNY
Developing a Statistical Project
The 17th lesson plan in a unit of 22 presents asks the class to conduct a statistics project. Pupils review the first two steps of the process of asking a question and collecting data. They then begin the process by developing a...
EngageNY
More Practice with Box Plots
Don't just think outside of the box — read outside of it! The 15th lesson in a 22-part unit provides pupils more work with box plots. Learners read the box plots to estimate the five-number summary and interpret it within the context....
EngageNY
Describing Variability Using the Interquartile Range (IQR)
The 13th instructional activity in a unit of 22 introduces the concept of the interquartile range (IQR). Class members learn to determine the interquartile range, interpret within the context of the data, and finish by finding the IQR...
EngageNY
Describing Distributions Using the Mean and MAD II
The 11th lesson in the series of 22 is similar to the preceding lesson, but requires scholars to compare distributions using the mean and mean absolute deviation. Pupils use the information to make a determination on which data set is...
EngageNY
Describing Distributions Using the Mean and MAD
What city has the most consistent temperatures? Pupils use the mean and mean absolute deviation to describe various data sets including the average temperature in several cities. The 10th lesson in the 22-part series asks learners to...
EngageNY
Variability in a Data Distribution
Scholars investigate the spread of associated data sets by comparing the data sets to determine which has a greater variability. Individuals then interpret the mean as the typical value based upon the variability.