Short activities with real data
Are there more fish species in warm lakes or cold lakes? Use this mini lesson to practice comparing groups within a dataset.
When Hurricane Sandy struck the east coast of the United States in the fall of 2012, much of the damage occurred because the storm surge combined with an extremely high tide at the end of October. Do you think that the corresponding low tides where higher than usual or lower than usual? You can try to answer this question by working with data from Bar Harbor tide tables. What do you think -- when the day's high tide is extremely high, is that same day's low tide extremely high or low? What kind of graph would you use to solve this problem?
Is high tide higher in the morning or in the evening? In this mini lesson you will be asked to interpret a couple different box plots to answer this question and explain your reasoning using the graph choice chart.
Use this template to construct your own mini lessons in the classroom!
How many major earthquakes occur worldwide in a year? Use this mini lesson to practice interpreting a frequency plot and make predictions about the occurrence of earthquakes in future years.
Do animals or plants have more chromosomes? How does chromosome number compare among different species of plants and animals? Use this mini lesson to practice making generalizations based on a frequency plot, which you will construct to compare groups within the given dataset.
How fast does the wind blow during a hurricane? In 2005, Hurricane Katrina and the destruction it caused made headlines in the news -- but how consistent were Katrina's wind speeds with the wind speeds of the several other hurricanes that took place in 2005?
How long do hurricanes usually last? In this mini lesson, you will work with hurricane data from the first decade of the 21st century to practice describing variability.
How do air and water temperatures in Penobscot Bay change over time? Can you relate the information presented in this lesson to what you learned in mini lesson 4 using the same dataset?
Is there a relationship between the temperature of the water and the temperature of the air in Penobscot Bay? Practice using a scatter plot to determine if these two variables are correlated.
