Nicholas R. Perrone
Increasing student health and integrating technology into everyday classroom lessons are two separate initiatives many schools share. My goal in this unit is to combine these two initiatives so students can learn practical data analysis and representation all within the constraints of the Scientific Method. In my unit,
Are we couch potatoes or busy bees?:
Data Analysis of Physical Activity in School
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students will take a proactive role in collecting data, entering the data into a computer spreadsheet program, creating pictorial representations of the data, and analyzing the data based on the various representations made by the class. The students will create appropriate graphs and/or charts to show the school-wide data over the course of the unit. Since the data will be collected on physical activity, the goal is to encourage the participating classes to compete with one another. This competition will determine which class completes the most amount of physical activity during the duration of the unit; thus promoting the school’s health and wellness initiative. The students who participate in the unit will display the data on a bulletin board where the rest of the school will have access to viewing it. If portable, this board will be sufficient for a science fair or other science-related activity.
