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.**