Olympics and Graphs

This is by no means groundbreaking, but it will be one of the options available to students in my sixth grade math class during our graphing unit.  During the unit they will learn the fundamentals of the coordinate plane, as well as review measures of central tendency and bar and pie graphs.  I am a big proponent of choice in the classroom - this mini-project will allow them to practice one of these main themes.  The poster will be one option on a menu unit, which is a modification of some of the ideas from Universal Design for Learning (I plan to blog about that experience/technique sometime over the next few months).

Graphing Winter Olympics Poster Guidelines

Select a poster topic from the options listed below.  Make sure your poster meets all of the requirements on the rubric.  It should be neat, colorful, and creative.  All information should be displayed clearly and writing should be very neat or typed.  Please ask a teacher if you have questions about expectations.

Use these websites:

Winter Olympics medal information: http://graphics.latimes.com/winter-olympics/

Population information: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

For countries that have changed names (such as Soviet Union à Russia and other countries or East & West Germany à Germany), however you choose to combine or separate results, be sure to state it clearly on your poster.

Option 1:  Create a scatter plot of the number of gold medals by country population for 10 countries from the 2014 Winter Olympics.  Write a 5-7 sentence reflection on the results displayed in your scatter plot (What surprised you? What trends did you notice?).

Option 2:  Create a bar graph of the number of gold, silver & bronze medals for 10 countries from the 2014 Winter Olympics.  Write a 5-7 sentence reflection on the results displayed on your bar graph (What surprised you? What trends did you notice?).

Option 3:  Create three separate pie charts of the distributions of gold, silver & bronze medals for the top 5 medal earning countries from the 2014 Winter Olympics.  Write a 5-7 sentence reflection on the results displayed on your pie charts (What surprised you? What trends did you notice?).

Option 4:  Calculate the mean, median and mode number of gold, silver & bronze medals for 15 countries from the 2014 Winter Olympics and clearly display your results.  Write a 5-7 sentence reflection on the contrast between the measures of central tendency (What surprised you? What similarities/differences did you notice?).

Option 5:  Calculate the mean, median and mode of the total number of medals for 5 countries from the past 10 Winter Olympics before Sochi (1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006, and 2010) and clearly display your results.  For each country, write a prediction of how many medals you think they earned in Sochi in 2014 based on their past performance and explain why you predicted that amount.  After making your prediction, check the Sochi medal total and see how close you were.  Write a 5-7 sentence reflection on how your predictions for 2014 for each country compared to their actual results in Sochi (What surprised you? What similarities/differences did you notice?).

Option 6:  Come up with your own way to graph medal information from the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and write an accompanying 5-7 sentence reflection about your results.  You must clear your personal idea with your math teacher.