With my Year 7 class we have recently been studying various aspects of data handling, including averages (including from frequency tables) and a variety of graphical representations. With the end of term drawing near, and having completed the scheme of work ahead of schedule, I decided to do one of my favourite projects with the: the Average Student (available to download from TES).
This project uses many areas of the data handling cycle, and in my opinion is an excellent way to get them to see the whole process.
Once I had introduced the task to them, we started off by discussing what kinds of information we could collect about the class. There were lots of good ideas, and a few more abstract ones as well, and we started to build up a spreadsheet of all the data that we wanted to include. It is really important (in my opinion) to let them decide which information it is that we should collect to give them more ownership over the task. I would recommend having a few ideas to include if they don't come up with any though. Height, eye colour, shoe size, number in family, etc are good ones, as they cover the different types of data.
The blank spreadsheet ready to input data.
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