Baby Name Distributions

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-tell-someones-age-when-all-you-know-is-her-name/

I am fascinated by baby name trends, but I don't know if students are. What I am most interested in with this is the intuition students will have about names, and how that helps set them up to understand distributions, especially bimodal distributions. I know that I have fairly set ideas about what names come from what eras (I hear "Agnes" and I picture an elderly woman; I hear "Kaylee" and I picture a young girl), so it helps with thinking about when median may or may not be the best measure of center. Also, there's a nice graph with interquartile ranges, which demonstrates why we care about the interquartile range. Finally, there's so much baby name data out there that kids could definitely research and construct their own graphs based on the questions that (I expect) will come up from looking at all this.

Graphing Stories: the Next Level

https://teacher.desmos.com/carnival/walkthrough#cannonman

This is so cool! It's like graphing stories, but the interactivity really helps hone in on kids' misconceptions around graphing. All those things about graphs just being pictures, about understanding what makes a function (beyond the vertical line test...), etc. are captured in the well-chosen scenarios.

I talk a lot of smack about blended learning or personalized learning or whatever they're calling it these days, but I am in no way opposed to technology use in the classroom. The Function Carnival is a great example of technology usage because it provides something that pencil and paper can't. Sure, it's probably engaging to a kid because it's on the computer and it has fun animation, but technology purely for engagement's sake is not enough. This technology also doesn't just feel like a way for teachers to measure some percentage of material learned. Those things are fine, but not really enough (at least for me). But this tool helps kids deepen their understanding of function from very different perspective. That is what technology should do--it should enhance teaching, not replace it.

Who's Lurking behind These?

42 strange things that correlate:
http://tylervigen.com/

Obviously, it's interesting fuel for the "correlation is not causation" discussion, particularly because it's interesting to think about what the lurking or confounding variables might be.

What I also think is interesting about these graphs is some of the graphs that seem to follow each other closely, but don't really have that high of a correlation coefficient. For example, Number people who drowned by falling into a swimming-pool vs. Number of films Niclas Cage appeared in. Most of the data has an r above .9, which is good, but I think it would be interesting for kids to talk about why the curves on that graph seem to rise and fall together, but the correlation coefficient is not really that convincing of there being a statistical correlation. 

Also cool: if you click on one of the variables, you can see how it correlates with a whole mess of other variables. This site could clearly could be a huge time suck for stats teacher trying to find interesting data to work from. 

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.