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?