technology with intention
Posts tagged QOD
Data Analysis
1233 days
by Jac de Haan
in 7th Grade
The 7th grade is back in the tech lab, ready to go in 2010. We spent our first period together reflecting on Fall Semester.
On the last day of school in December, students took an online self-reflection survey to share their experience with the first 3 months of iCLAST (integrated class of language arts, science and technology).
Today we took the anonymous quantitative data from that survey and explored trends between student submissions. Students were also given a data set from the 08-09 school year for comparison.
The QOD (Question of the Day): Based on student ratings, was last school year’s iCLAST more difficult than this year?
Q.O.D. – WolframAlpha to the rescue
1260 days
by Jac de Haan
in 7th Grade
Question of the day: online research skills
Which of the current President’s daughters’ nicknames was more popular in the last public record of U.S. baby names?
Students quickly recognized that this was a “think and search” question…and there were multiple puzzles to solve:
- current President: Barack Obama
- daughters’ nicknames: Sasha & Malia
- last public record: 2008
So the question became, “Which name was more popular in 2008, Sasha or Malia?”
There were quite a few ways of finding this answer using search engines. Most students ended up at babynames.com or the Social Security Administration website. Some employed the Control+F keyboard shortcut to search for names in a list.
Once the dust settled, Halley, Elijah and Twig took top prize for cracking the code! We then took a few minutes to get familiar with WolframAlpha, a computational knowledge engine that is built specifically for mathematical and statistical analysis. Typing in “sasha, malia name 2008″ quickly netted a clear answer:
