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Project: Bivariate Data

This is the first time I have tried this project in this manner for AP Statistics.  In the past, I have had students look online for bivariate data, and perform statistic-y stuff with it.  However, students would just Google "bivariate data" and, inevitably, I would have many of the same projects - ice cream sales and temperature.  How boring?

 Fast forward to last week when I was searching for a file in my drive and ran across a Stations Activity shared by Jared Derksen (check out his blog here) with me.  I started looking through the stations and thought, "Why have I not done this before?"  Well, that changed!

 Jared originally had 8 stations in his activity, some of the stations dealt with perishable food.  I do not know about you, but I need to be able to keep things in my room to use for student activities.  Basically, I'm so last minute that I worry when I pull out this activity next time, I will not have the items on hand.  So, I changed the Cheerios stations to use washers (my husband is in construction so this was a no-brainer) and ditched the Red Vines station (though I would have chosen Twizzlers over Red Vines, clearly).  Okay, I widdled it down to 5 stations but I think I should add a few back next time - this will give me smaller groups and more options for the project itself.  Make a copy of my stations cards if you're interested.

 I give the kiddos a sheet to fill out at each station with the data they have collected.  The hope was that if there was a breakdown on one of the spreadsheets, we could easily correct it.  That was a cute thought... Each station had a laptop for the students to enter their data on a Google Sheet.  I created 5 tabs, one for each station, and had the sheet opened to the correct tab for that particular station.  Foolproof, right?  Of course not.  One group opened a new tab so data was being entered for the wrong station.  No big deal, we caught it early. There were also some issues with the Birthday Station.  Students were not properly calculating how many days remained in the month.  This made some months have over 50 days in them.  Again, we corrected it (thankfully my students are super adept!).
Once the students completed all of the stations, they paired up and begin the project write-up.  I share the Google Sheet with them (copied version) so they can play around and get used to using this tool.  They learn really fast how to make scatterplots and find regression.  Some students used Desmos since they are more familiar with that platform.  Even finding residuals and creating a residual plot was straight-forward.  Yay!

 I really enjoyed giving this little project.  I know I will be adjusting it for next time, but the gist is there.

 ~SSB






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