OVERVIEW

Activity Overview:

This lesson serves as a final project for my Data Science unit. Students will ask a question, write a hypothesis, develop a means of collecting data, analyze their data. In culmination they present their data to the class and write an essay evaluating their process.

Meta description

• Subject Area: Computer Science
• Grade Level : 6-8, 9-12
• Computer Science Domains:
  • Data Analysis
• Computer Science Principles:
  • Recognizing and Defining Computational Problems
  • Creating Computational Artifacts
• Materials:
  • Website, Google Docs

Lesson Plan

Overview

This lesson serves as a final project for my Data Science unit. Students will ask a question, write a hypothesis, develop a means of collecting data, analyze their data. In culmination they present their data to the class and write an essay evaluating their process.

ASSESSMENT PRE/POST-TEST

This was a culminating activity so I didn’t have a pre and post test. Below are some of the pre and post test questions for other lessons in the unit.

Is the number of cents of change you have in your pocket an example of continuous or discrete data? Is hair color an example of nominal or ordinal data? What data relationship/association is represented by each of the charts? Identify the sampling method. Then identify any bias in each of the data collection methods: What is an outlier? How do you deal with them? Find the mean, median and mode of the data set:

OBJECTIVES

I can create a means of collecting data to answer a question. I know how to organize, collect and clean data. I can perform basic statistical analysis on data and present my findings.

CATCH/HOOK

We had a class discussion about their interests and what they were curious about. I asked them to make a list of questions they were interested in.

ACTIVITY INSTRUCTIONS

The students created a list of questions they were interested in finding answers to. We talked about their lists and how they could collect data. They decided on a question and wrote a hypothesis to guide them through data collection. The students had a couple of days to prepare for data collection, some wrote surveys, some collected sports data from our school teams, some prepared an experiment, some located data from government agencies. We moved on to another subject for two weeks to give them time to collect their data. When we came back they had four days to clean, analyze, prepare visualizations, write a small essay and get ready to present their findings to the class. Final deliverables were: cleaned data set, collected data set, essay evaluating process, and a presentation slide deck.

Supplements

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REVIEW

Before starting the Data Science Unit I did a pre-test to ascertain their knowledge of statistics. Prior to the lesson we reviewed: data sets, data matrices, types of data, data associations, outliers, types of studies, surveying, sampling, and bias. We also did daily data talks where they looked at data visualizations and analyzed what the data showed us.

STANDARDS