When are Babies Born?

Are births evenly distributed across time of day, day of the week, and time of year?

http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/2004/04000/Timing_of_Birth_After_Spontaneous_Onset_of_Labor.8.aspx

The raw data is in the tables. I think kids would be interested in this question, and the results are kind of surprising.

What Are the Odds of Twins Born in Different Years?

The best thing about teaching probability and statistics, in my opinion, is that it's so much easier (and fun!) to find interesting contexts for problems. I feel like I don't have a good sense of what data is actually interesting to kids, but this question seems like it would capture some imaginations:

http://freakonomics.com/2014/02/05/what-are-the-odds-of-twins-born-in-different-years/

This also feels like a Fermi problem in some ways.

Rather than having kids actually answer this question, I think it would be more interesting for them to try to make sense of the methodology described in the post, the comments, etc. Analyzing someone else's process is a big part of evaluating is reasonableness. Oh, hey SMP #3...

Population Density Redistribution

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/01/30/what-the-u-s-map-would-look-like-if-population-matched-state-size/

I wonder what else you could have kids redistribute.

Graphing Stories

I love having kids play with the story that a graph tells, or creating a graph that describes a story. I like this take on it: video.

http://graphingstories.com/

I'm not sure I agree with all their categorizations, but that's fine. I like that there are a decent amount of video clips where the graph will not end up just looking like a picture of what happened (e.g. time vs. altitude when someone is climbing a mountain doesn't really help kids make sense of axes).

Just as important as having this library, it makes me think about other quick, easy activities that you could film and have kids graph. Extra bonus: have kids make their own 15-second films or find YouTube clips of something you could graph.

Headlines from a Mathematically Illiterate World

http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/12/02/headlines-from-a-mathematically-literate-world/

The longer I teach, the more I think that the math that feels most important for students to take away from my class is about learning to read, interpret, and critically evaluate the logical/illogical statements that float around every day. I do actively enjoy pure math kinds of things, but if it came down to a choice of residue, I'd give up a robust understanding of derivatives for my kids leave being able to read a graph in the newspaper and evaluate the reasonableness of the latest study's claim.

I think it would be really fun for kids to find ridiculous statements in news articles and correct them like this. It would be interesting to develop that critical eye for poorly worded statements, both from a language and a mathematical perspective.

Love, and Love Lost

Visualizations of Love:
http://love.seebytouch.com/#LetMeShowYou

Clearly some are more mathy than others, but I like the variation in the types of visualizations.

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And quantifications of love no more:
http://quantifiedbreakup.tumblr.com/

Sometimes when kids tell me that they're in a bad mood or not feeling well, I respond that doing math problems always makes you feel better. Looks like I wasn't making it up. Doing math as therapy is real!

Where's Waldo?

If this isn't real-world math, I don't know what is.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/11/where_s_waldo_a_new_strategy_for_locating_the_missing_man_in_martin_hanford.html

I like what you can do with this around probability and area. It also makes me think about what kids hear/understand when they use and read the word "random." Do they think that Waldo is placed randomly? Why or why not? What would the pages look like if he were to be placed randomly?

I also like that it takes something that looks like it has little order, and uses math to help you see something you wouldn't otherwise be able to notice.