I have loved playing Shut the Box this past year so wanted to make a classroom version (I could bring the actual game but wanted to do a quick version that involved the whole class at the start of a lesson)

The idea of this task is students can all join in with the same task

I roll two dice, they total the dice and either cross out one number or two numbers that have the same total.

Kathryn Darwin and Charlotte Hawthorne and I decided to jointly deliver a workshop at mathsconf. We wanted to choose a topic, collaboratively plan a lesson and then after delivering the lesson, we would discuss it. Below are the slides from mathsconf26 and some of the tasks.

I’m not sure this is an activity I can use in the future as its more relevant to now but I wanted to relate time series to something current. I struggle to teach these topics as I feel we often use “made up” data. I like to use the students data for many data topics…

EG: I ask students to hold their breath on two occasions in a lesson and record the times for both and plot a scatter diagram

I plot their test 1 and test 2 scores from recent assessments and compare the results.

If I’m looking at frequency tables we collect data on students favourite number between 1-100 or the number of pets owned.

All of these are time consuming but I feel its better to look at a couple of scatter diagrams or frequency tables, pie charts etc in a lesson if the data has come from the students because we can predict how we think the results may look and discuss any outliers.

When it comes to Times Series I find collecting student information tricker. So we often look at sales of ice-cream over the course of a year or similar which is data that is often made up for the sake of the lesson.

I thought about how covid-19 would affect certain time series and after reading an article about a huge drop in passenger numbers at Heathrow in 2020 I decided to focus on passenger numbers at Heathrow for this topic.

I had a look at GDP, weather, population, Area of land to create some scatter diagrams.

I wondered about what students could deduce from the results and comment on the correlations.

I will be explaining how I obtained the data and discuss how the scatter diagrams are misleading because of the small sample size. We will discuss what can be deduced from the results and if the results are misleading/bias.

Saw a question I liked in the Kerboodle book our school uses. So I made some similar questions and included their one (right hand side question/third question)