Category Archives: Handling Data

129. A pie without a stab wound

A pie? Without a stab wound? What craziness is this?

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From a cook’s perspective this pie divider is a great way to cut pie and not stab yourself. Google ‘pie divider’ for other genius/bonkers ideas.

But … back to school:

Imagine you are teaching pie charts. You’ve discussed what they are about, how to calculate angles, you may even have used the earlier blog post on Human Pie Charts. The class settle down to apply all their knowledge, when the floodgates open:

  • ‘What’s that thingy you draw circles with?’
  • ‘My pencil doesn’t fit in my compasses?’
  • ‘I haven’t got a compass.’ (Do you mean pair of compasses?)
  • ‘I did have a compass (!), but Mr X took it off me in Y.’ (Why?) ‘ I was stabbing Z with it!’
  • ‘My compasses keep going wiggly’
  • ‘I’ve made a hole in my book’
  • ‘I forgot to mark where I put the point bit’
  • …..etc

By the time all this is sorted out, all their shiny new knowledge has shrivelled away.

 

A helping hand

To assist with this issue, I’ve put together an A4 sheet of 6 piechart templates that you could enlarge on a copier. They’ll get you through the first pie-chart drawing lesson and set you up for
Round 2
:

‘You know that pointy thing you told us to bring to this lesson and I even wrote it in my homework planner well I had one in my new geometry set aren’t you impressed that I finally bought one but my mum said I had to lend it to my brother for his test and he’s only just given it back and he’s wrecked it and he said he’ll get me a new one but he doesn’t get paid until next Saturday and he’ll forget but that’s the reason …I haven’t got a compass(!) today.

123. Jaffa Moon

I’ve just spent the morning doing a cross curricular primary reward project with gifted and talented Y5/6 pupils. I was working with two colleagues from Science and Art. We were doing SAM, rather than STEM. It was brilliant!

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We made bouncy balls, bounced them in flour and cocoa powder, videoed the impacts, photoshopped the crater pictures, compared width of impact crater with the height dropped (scatter graph), calculated the speed of impact of the balls on Earth and on the moon – we even did the Jaffa cake phases of the moon. Our scientist gave us the correct terminonology and we did it correctly, unlike the memorable advert:

Jaffa Cake advert

It did take us more than one jaffa cake … ahem, I mean attempt… to get it right. For the sake of accuracy, you understand …

113. Did the Little Thinkers get you thinking?

Did my Little Thinkers give you ideas for a lesson?

I hope so!

These are my little crisp people and they’ve been helping pupils learn for over a decade.

I first thought up this task when an interactive whiteboard and digital projector came in the form of an overhead projector. Using the brand new concept of colour printing onto inkjet OHP transparencies, we could move these little people around the board and investigate different problems. Each number represents the number of bags of crisps eaten in a week. Each colour represents a flavour (Blue = salt & vinegar, red = ready salted, green = cheese & onion, pink = prawn cocktail).

You can sort by number of bags eaten:

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You can create a flavour pictogram:

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In fact you can use this resource with KS2 & KS3 to investigate lots of topics:
Sorting by category (number/colour)
Ordering numbers
Pictograms
Venn diagrams
Carroll diagrams
Bar-charts
Averages
Questionning
Probability

And anything else you can think of.

I’ve created an editable template of figures, in three different sizes. You print them out and use them individually, in group work or on the wall. There is also a teacher guide on how to use the crisp people.

Enjoy!

Download your little people below:

Editable template  crisp-people-template-blank

Teacher guide and presentation crisp_people_guide

102. Can you stay out of the Boardroom?

The_Apprentice__The_Final

The Apprentice regularly features its contestants failing to listen to what people want, often with disastrous results.

  •  They carry out market research with the wrong people or not enough people.
  • They assume the people they are asking are brilliant or thick. Seriously, you won’t find a world class wine expert working in the local supermarket!
  • They don’t change their product to meet the needs of the people.
  • Worse than that – they ignore the brief!

It all of this leads to one place: The Boardroom

Can your pupils avoid being fired?

I’ve been using ‘The Apprentice’ as an inspiration for a data handling project for years and I’ve finally typed up a resource to go with it.

Download Would Lord Sugar invest in you? worksheet

97. The Dancing Cipher (part two)

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If you look back to one of my early blog posts called ‘The Dancing Cipher’ on code breaking, I explained how to use the ‘Dancing Men’ code as an extended homework project.

You can now download the instructions/task, self assessment sheet and solution below:

Self-assessment sheet

Letter frequency analysis project

Letter frequency analysis project answer

71. Algebra with a dash of probability

If you are on the Ikea Family mailing list you may have got a booklet with this a few months ago:

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It’s basically a decision spinner in the form of a hexagonal prism. On the reverse you are asked to customise it:

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Being a maths geek I thought about writing algebraic expressions. You can customise the difficulty for individual pupils.

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All the pupils do is roll a standard die and the prism. Then they substitute that value into the expression.

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You can increase the difficulty by using a variety of non-standard dice.

Construction
All you need is a strip of card – say 12cm long and some tape.
Rule off every two centimetres, fill in the gaps, fold and stick.

Probability
There are two probability questions to consider:

Bias
Is the roller fair?

The Ikea one wasn’t due to the cardboard flaps weighting one side. Over-enthusiastic taping could have a similar effect.

Outcomes
How do you know when you have had all the possible combinations of number and expression?

This could be a nice way to think about listing outcomes and sample space diagrams.

Once you start thinking of ways to use these dice rollers, it is amazing how many topics you could cover.