Exponential Water Tank

Apparently some guy once said, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." I'm pretty sure I'm not on board with that statement, but I do agree that exponentials are very challenging to make sense of. Linear growth is intuitive; exponential growth is not. 


This video shows a tank of water filling up at an exponential rate. I think it would be interesting to have kids watch to really think about how fast its growing, and talk about what it means for something to grow at the same rate, or a constant rate. I wish there was a side-by-side video or another version showing linear (or quadratic) growth. 

http://bl.ocks.org/hanbzu/9787042

Another thought with this video: use it in the introduction to exponentials and have kids make some predictions, do some graphing, etc. The clock in the corner is handy. Less handy is the fact that there's no marked height anywhere. If you projected onto a whiteboard could you mark height? 

Mario's a Baller

http://www.supercompressor.com/tech/13-things-you-probably-didn-t-know-about-nintendo

See fact #9: Mario has a 27’ vertical leap.

This seems like a fun addition to "How High Can Your Teacher Jump?" or any kind of proportional reasoning kind of thing.

What would we look like if we measured human heights in pixels? What would that mean for how tall Mario is compared to a human? How much bigger is Big Mario vs. Little (pre-mushroom) Mario? How big would YOU be if you ate a mushroom (or alternatively, if you're full size now, how tall would you be after running into a goomba)?

Do kids even recognize pixelated Mario anymore these days?

Lies, Damned Lies, Beautiful Lies

https://visualisingadvocacy.org/blog/disinformation-visualization-how-lie-datavis

I am in love with this article. Obviously data visualization can be just as persuasive as data provided in different ways (raw data vs. percentage vs. percent increase, etc.), but I like how this article specifically calls out the visual persuasion tactics.

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.