Playing with Numbers: Reflection and What Next?

A little over 2 weeks ago I posted a blog where I played with some numbers to make predictions about medal totals for various countries competing in the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Jsaniero, Brazil. My motivation for this blog came out of some posts and conversations regarding the avalanche of curriculum connections to the Olympic Games. In short, I wanted to play with real data, manipulate it in a way that made sense to me and from this work, make measurable predictions for an event taking place in the now. Here are how my predictions played out:

At the end of my first blog I graciously asked for a +/-5 range when looking at final totals, so if we take that into account you would see that 6 out of 10 predictions were spot on, 2 were somewhat close (Germany & Australia) and the remaining 2 not so much (USA & Great Britain).

I will fully admit that during the Games I was checking totals and comparing them to my predictions. I was engaged in both the greatness of the Olympic Games but also in my mathematical predictions. I was excited to see how it would all play out. Would students feel the same? I tend to think they would.

So what now?

Full disclosure, at this point in the activity in the past, I would say great job, wrap it up and quickly move onto the next task. Nowadays however, I feel that this is where the most crucial learning for our students may live. Now that we have all this data, let's zoom in and explore what happened, lets ask why, lets form new hypotheses for future predictions based on the new results we have in front of us.

We could ask:

What would you change if you were to make the same predictions again?
What new data might you choose to include in your predictions?
Did you use the right data?
Did you recognize any significant trends?
What sticks out to you?
What could you explore more?
What looks like it doesn't belong?

A prediction can be defined as a forecast of future events (Google Search). Knowing what we know about weather forecasts, the outcome is often unknown and the expectation to be right 100% of the time should be unrealistic (right Weather people?). The true learning however, rests in the answers we get to questions above, as they should tell us all we need to know about how well our students understand the concept.

It is my hope that an activity like this will stimulate future student driven learning. Feedback on predictions is instant, daily and REAL! Opportunities exist everyday for revision, comparison and tweaking. Conversations about each student's prediction will be that much deeper because they were the ones who chose the data, they selected how to manipulate it and it was them who fearlessly predicted the unknown outcome.

This excites me.

What will your fearless predictions of 2017 be?

Playing with Numbers: The Power of Prediction to Engage Young Learners

A few days ago I was tagged in a Tweet posted by @lisaannefloyd in which she shared a link to an article she wrote about different ideas for engaging students with the current Summer Olympic Games in Rio De Janiero, Brazil. Here is a link to the article, https://makerbloks.com/watch-the-olympics-with-your-kids/.

I really liked Lisa's ideas and in fact, her ideas kick-started some further conversation online in which even more ideas were shared. Through the conversation it became very apparent that so many items from our Ontario curriculum could be touched on through an event like the Olympics. Try it for yourself: Geography?n Yup. Descriptive Writing? Uh huh. Probability? Sure. Social justice issues? Heck yes.

I was so inspired through these conversations and ideas that I went home and immediately began working on one myself. My activity rests on the idea of playing with numbers to make some predictions. Specifically, I am going to use data from the past 5 Summer Olympics to try and predict medal totals. I have selected Countries that often appear in the top 10, as well as Canada. I have chosen to exclude Russia due to all the suspensions related to doping infractions. In simple terms, I took a look at the medal totals for each Country in relation to the number of athletes sent to the Games. I divided the number of medals earned by the number of athletes in attendance to produce a percentage. Here is a link to my data, https://goo.gl/1Abq7I.

I then took the percentages and loaded them into a table for analysis of potential trends. The 2016 column has # of athletes currently attending the 2016 Olympics:

How do I see this being used in the classroom?

I found this activity powerful. Throughout the process I was deeply engaged in the task. Why? I think for a few reasons. For one, I selected the question to explore. I do not need to go into how important this is for our students. I also was able to select the data I wanted to investigate. This may be a little more difficult for our students, but what an important skill to develop as a learner? If I want to answer a question, shouldn't I know what data to examine? Lastly, I found this to be so engaging because it's current, live and something I can follow. I can see in real-time how my predictions are faring. Would students feel the same way? I tend to think so. While we might not have the luxury of Olympics every year, we do have other annual leagues/events we could use. Currently my mind is hovering over the sports umbrella, but I do wonder what other events could provide this type of opportunity?

Fearless Medal Count Predictions...

Last but not least...fearless medal count predictions. Full disclosure, I used my own formula, a little bit of math mixed with a little bit of gut feeling. I am asking for a +/- 5 leniency w hen it comes to final totals so please be easy on me!

**I obtained all facts/figures from www.wikipedia.org & www.olympic.org.**