In honor of President’s Day this coming Monday, it seems appropriate for this months’ lesson feature to be center around information about presidents. There is a lot of data that you could explore with students about presidents – age, number years in office, age when they died, number of children, etc. But, I simply chose one statistic – i.e. age at inauguration, to make this really a focused lesson on using a set of data to explore data representations and measures of center.
The Lesson
The idea of this lesson is to help students look at different ways of representing data (table, dot plot, histogram and box-and-whisker plot) in order to make some conjectures and observations. And depending on the representation, really thinking about the information you are able to glean. Can you estimate measures of center from visual representations of data? Is one representation better than another for a given set of data.
ClassPad.net is a great tool for a lesson like this because it allows for students to see all representations 
in one spot, continually add on representations, and also provides a place to write down observations and conclusions. You will see that the shared paper (the complete lesson) has explanations, questions, directions all in the one place, and students are doing the math and making their conjectures after each step. It’s an all-in-one, multiple representation activity. Here is the link to the shared paper, that you can use freely with students. If you want to create a duplicate copy to save, you must create a free Classpad.net account and ‘duplicate’ the paper there once you open it. This will create your own copy that you can modify and then share with your own students. Either way, the idea is that students can do multiple representations and measures of central tendency very quickly and make some mathematical connections and conclusions about the given presidential data.
ClassPad.net Lesson In Action
I’ve made a short video that explains the lesson a bit more and walks through the how-to’s of creating the different plots and shows the different aspects of the lesson (i.e. the text stickies, tables, plots, etc.). As usual, you will notice a lot of questions built into the activity, where students are asked to observe, notice, compare and write down their observations. My suggestion for this activity is to do each step and really pause after to allow students individual think time, but then also bring them back together (pair up first, then whole class) to make sure everyone is on the same page before moving to the next step.
Again – here is the shared paper link: ES/MS President’s Day Lesson
