Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability Summary

Monday - Friday, June 27 - July 1, 2005

On Monday, we introduced ourselves, which included our names, where and what we taught as well as our comfort level with Fathom™. We worked on a simulation called Fish 'N Chips. It is an activity, written by Gail Burrill, that will appear in an NCTM yearbook. White and black beans were used instead of poker chips to do the simulation. The group discussed the results. Some time was allocated for participants to explore with Fathom.

Tuesday, we had our group photo taken. Meiling Dang agreed to be our representative at Carol's Wednesday Breakfast Club. Most of the class was spent exploring Fathom. Some of the group went to the computer lab for more focused exploration of Fathom, which included making case tables, graphs, sliders and using formulae. Others continued working on activities in the Learning Guide or Workshop Guide.

On Thursday, participants continued working on activities from the Learning Guide and Workshop Guide. Some looked at the Fathom document for the Fish 'N Chips activity discussed on the first day. A smaller group looked at activities from the NCTM Navigation series on Data and Probability. Participants imported data from the Internet. Some experienced difficulty importing data from a URL. The culprit was the browser. It was not compatible with Fathom.

A brainstorming session was held on Friday. The following ideas as things we might like to look into for the Data final project.

• Health data eg: over the counter drugs, sedentary teenagers
• Tracking movie receipts (income)
• To be used with multiple levels - Algebra 1, Algebra 2, AP Stats
• Body surface area
• Making an activity in Navigating through Probability and Statistics, NCTM Fathom ready
• Using sliders for parameter changes (check previous years)
• US Census Data to study 2 regions (eg Southwest and West) for demographics - may want to take into consideration data of commercial value vs data not of commercial value
• Probability?
• Connection to this year's theme
• Sports data (may need to take into consideration changes in sport like height of the pitcher's mound when analysing)
• World demography
• Use data from UN studies

At the end of the brainstorming session, participants were asked to look at activities created in previous years and to be more focused in their explorations with Fathom in order to help them decide what final project they would like to work on.

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