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?

Aaron came closest to cracking the data.  He used a formula to figure out how many students assigned each rating and then graphed the results.

The formula: =COUNTIF(Sheet1!$A$2:$A$38, “1″) and repeat while replacing the “1″ with the rating given.

His resulting charts looked like this – enjoy drawing your own conclusions:

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: