Data Unit: Day Six

(This is a day by day of the Data: Lets do the Numbers Unit in CS Principles. The overview is here.)

Today we finally started working on the Data Portfolio. Today the focus is selecting a data set and creating the questions. My plan is next class they start really working with the data.

From the national Archives - the intent was a photo of a mine,  but found this instead  Toilet at head of stairs leading from basement in vacant house of company housing project. Industrial Collieries Corporation, Barrackville #41 Mine, Barrackville, Marion County, West Virginia., 06/13/1946 - hilarious!

They were really engaged in this today. I let them choose three people they would like to work with, and three they would not. I then assigned partners based on these requests. It was pretty funny, every student either selected them self as someone they want to work with or someone they did not want to work with. We all had a good chuckle at this.

The list of what we did is below. They really chose some interesting data sets. Many chose to start with Data.gov and search from there. Some of the topics they have chosen:

• Israel Palestine
• Traffic Fatalities as relate to Speeding
• Crime Statistics
• Government Spending in the US
• Average Income per State
• Violent Crime Rates
• Mining accidents

The mining accidents was a bit of a head-scratcher, but it has turned out to be pretty interesting.

(You can see all the CS Principles documents here)

Here is the listing of what we did:

• Fast Start:

1. Do the Partner Selection survey 
2. From the work we did before break describe the kinds of question we can answer with data? What kinds of questions can not be answered?

• Journal Response: Building your Questions - Today we are building your questions about data. With your partner brainstorm 3 areas you would like to investigate with data. The link we used last class to some data sets is below.
• Meet with teacher to discuss data set selection - we discussed:
• What is the source?
• Is it at least 5000 pieces of data?
• Do you think this data set can answer your questions? How?
• Journal Response: Develop a set of 3&5 questions that will be the focus of the investigation and submit them here. 
• Online: Submit your dataset link
• Start writing: They started on the collaborative part of the paper.
• The first part of your paper will include: (this is from the data portfolio rubric)
• Overview of your investigation: a description of the intent of the investigation and how it will be used to gain insight and knowledge;
• The set of 3 to 5 questions that you will answer.
• Explanation and justification of how the data and other sources used in your investigation (if any) are appropriate for exploring and answering the questions.
• Information about the data set(s): a description of each data set; the URL of the data set; the date on which you accessed the data; and where possible a reference to the data set from  a written work (e.g., an article, book, or blog post).
• Type these out in word and submit the file here. ALL partners must have a  copy of this file and submit it before leaving today.