Data Displays

April 26th, 2019

When you hear the words data displays what exactly do you think of?  Did you know that displaying data could actually be fun and your students could learn while doing something fun and productive?
I am a very visual learner and by creating graphs, I can display data and learn from it all at the same time.  I am able to use my creativity which makes it fun for me because I am creating a masterpiece to showcase my work, well at least I like to think so!

This day in class we made data displays to show how you could display Categorical and Numeric Data in a nice visual way and have fun doing it. We learned about Continuous data and Discreet data and what graphs are good for using certain data sets.  The data displays we made in class had us listing the advantages and disadvantages to each graph so there is a lot of information in these 2 foldables that we can use in the future.  This is my second time making these so I knew what to expect and tried to do better than I had previously.  

Categorical Data Display

Numerical Data Display

Each fold out shows us an example of the graph and the Advantages and Disadvantages that come along with using each graph to display said data. Gives you the pro's and con's to think about for when you have that need to display data.  We use and see things like this is every day life and we can easily use this as a teaching tool with future students.

Important parts of a graph that are essential to having a good graph: #1 A title that describes the experiment.  #2 Lables - each axis should be labeled with the quantity being measure and the units of measurement. Horizontal x-axis the independant variable and Vertical y-axis the dependant variable, both must be labeled. #3 Scale of graph. #4 Symbols - if using symbols you must include their representation.  #5 Legend.

Types of Graphs

Pictographs - A pictograph is a way of showing data using pictures(symbols).  Each picture stands for a certain number of things, like above each basketball stands for 10 games played.  So Terri played 20 games because she has 2 basketballs, Sue played 10 games because she only has 1 basketball and Maddie only played 10 games as well.

Bar Graphs - Graph using rectangular bars to show how large each value is, bars can be vertical or horizontal.  The bar graph above shows how many kids have dogs, fish, cats, lizards, and spiders for pets.

Circle Graphs - Also known as pie charts shows whole and parts of the whole, values are represented and labeled.  The pie chart aboves shows favorite colors in class, 50% of class likes blue, 25% like pink, 12.5% like salmon and 12.5% like purple.

Stem & Leaf - This is a special table where each data value is split into a "stem" (the first digit or digits) and a "leaf" (usually the last digit).  The stem and leaf above shows the 19 test score of students in class.

Histogram - They are similar to a bar chart, but a histogram groups numbers into ranges.  The height of each bar shows how many fall into each range.  Because they are in ranges the bars are connected, the only time there would be a gap is if no one or thing was in that range.

Dot Plot - A dot plot is a statistical chart consisting of data points plotted on a fairly simple scale, typically using filled in circles like the one above, each dot represents a certain thing in this case the if it is blue it represents a boy and if it is pink it is a girl. The dot plot is graphing bed times in 2nd grade.

Some others we used in class but not pictured above.

Line Graphs - Used to show how data changes over time, continuous data.

Scatter Plots - Used to show relationship between 2 data sets.

Box Plots - Used to show Median, Quartiles and extremes of a data set.

There are other types of graphs but these are the ones we used primarily in class.  The National Center for Education Statistics, NCES has a very cool tool you can experiment with and make different graphs online.  I found the site to be very educational.

Displaying and Interpreting Data

This video does not show all graphs but it is catching and cute! Enjoy, Terri

Graphs - M & M's Yum!

April 10th, 2019

So your sitting in class and your teacher hands you a bag of M&M's, tells you NOT to eat them and it's lunch time!
Today we used graphs to display data and to explore the relationships among the data and today it happened to be All about the M&M's!  We would be collecting individual data about our bag of M&M's then combining our individual data's with the class as a whole to see if we could find the relationship between what colors of M&M's happen more often?  Is there a set color or amount to the M&M's in our candy bags?

So my individual bag had 4 brown, 2 blue, 3 yellow, 0 red, 2 green, 2 orange.
Our Class data of 20 people in class was 33 yellow, 51 brown, 60 blue, 62 green, 55 orange and 48 red, a total of 309 M&M's.

Statistical data is often displayed graphically, we did just that today and by presenting the data as a set of numbers it made it easier to study the relationships in the data.
Here are a couple of pictures I took during our activity in class.  We took our grouped data and put it into a pictograph.  We had the color of M&M's and each M&M on the graph represented 10 M&M's,  We also made a bar graph and each bar represented the number of M&M's we got in each color.  We had 16% Brown, 18% Orange, 19% blue, 20% green, 16% red, and 11% yellow.

Grouped Data

Pictograph and Bar Graph with Grouped Data

Dot plots of Grouped Data 

After completing all the grouped data we constructed a strip of paper, divided it into parts that represented the colors and amounts of m&m's per color and their percentages, we then connected the 2 ends of the strip of paper making a circle.  We were then able to lay out circle out on a piece of paper and mark out the "parts" of the whole circle, the parts being each color.  We drew a big circle on the paper and colored in the parts of the whole til we made a pie chart or you could call it a circle graph.  I loved the idea of making the circle, it allowed us to see the relation of data to the graph and also the parts to the whole as we constructed it.  Here is our Example:

Circle Graph / Pie Chart

After coloring our Pictographs we were allowed to eat our M&M's because they were now be represented by colored dots on our paper rather than the actual M&M.  This was a fun activity!  This is something you could easily do with several different grade levels, the hardest part is getting them not to eat the candy!
Do Not Feed the Animals!
Terri

This video is an example of what we did we our M&M's.  The graph construction is not the same but would be a variation.  I like the way we did it making the tape diagram/fraction strips, either way would work but gives more ideas to what we have available to us to use.

By: Mcdoyal