InspireDaisies

I have a standard data collection activity, borrowed from AbsentCat, which I call “Pushing up the daisies”. That’s not a very good name, bearing no relation to what actually happens, but it has the virtue of amusing pupils.It’s a quadrat exercise. Each pupil takes a pen, an old sock rolled into a ball, and a sheet of A4 card with a 100mm square hole in the centre of it. We all go to the centre of a convenient expanse of grass, form a circle facing outward, and throw our socks. Where the sock lands, put your sheet of card and count how many daisies are visible through the hole. Write the number down on the sheet of card, throw your sock again. Repeat until the novelty wears off, then return to the centre of the grass area to collate the results.

Sometimes, with a small group, I will replace both card and sock with a frisbee in the centre of which a circular 113mm hole (to match the area of the 100mm square) has been cut.Throwing things around in the open air is always preferable, on a sunny day, to being indoors. We usually take a picnic along, and a set of palmtop computers, so we can conduct the subsequent analysis of our daisy data in relaxation amongst the daisies themselves. This approach pays dividends: I get a lot of good natured work out of children who would get bored and impatient if we did academically equivalent work indoors.

This week, instead of the palmtops, my year fours (age 8-9) took a laptop with InspireData (reviewed here). Instead of writing their results on the card, and collating them later in a spreadsheet, the pupils brought each count back to the laptop and typed it into InspireData’s data entry “questionnaire”. Each observation was identified by the child’s name, and a photograph of a daisy was imported to replace the standard marker, so as the session proceeded we watched a growing histogram of labeled daisies gradually assemble on screen.

The class kept on gathering data much longer than usual, keen to see their name on screen as often as possible. Result: a much larger results database than usual, and more pupil involvement in the analysis phase.

I plan to follow up, at the end of this week, with botany and geography lessons based on the results using the InspireData histogram as a reference point for analogy with quantitative methods in both of those fields.

“Pushing up the daisies” is a good educational activity, offering a number of painless entry points to maths and science topics. InspireData adds immeasurably to it.

[contributed by Sayid]