Today 5th graders in Mr. Peters’ class created interactive graphs using Numbers. They started out with a template that you can download by clicking here. They picked a topic they were interested in graphing, such as favorite sport or favorite candy and wrote the title. Then they went to Shapes, created a shape, changed the color, and copied and pasted it about 20 times so there were enough counters for each student in the class. Next they went around the room and clicked and dragged the shapes on their classmates documents to vote on their favorite things. When they got back to their own document, they counted the markers for each choice and typed in the number. Then I showed them how to graph the data. For the interactive part, I told them to come up with a multiple step problem about the data that would challenge their peers. For example, one student came up with the question “How many more people like Skittles and Twix than M&Ms and Hersheys?” Next I taught them how to create a formula that would check the answer. It went something like this: “If the student response equals the real answer, then say ‘Way to go!’ Otherwise say, ‘You need to study more!'” They could come up with their own replies, and some were rather creative. Finally they tested their formulas by switching with a friend and solving each others’ problems. You can download a couple of student examples here: Amber and Jamilah.

Ms. Elsea at Davis Elementary had a great idea to challenge some of her math students. She wanted them to research the high and low temperatures of cities at different latitudes in the United States. Then she wanted them to compare the data, look for patterns, and try to infer reasons for the differences. So she asked me to help them with the graphing part. I created a Numbers template for them to use that you can download by clicking here. After students entered their data, I showed them how to graph it as a line graph. Even though a line graph is traditionally used for showing changes over time, it works well with this data since there were several things we were looking at and the relationships wouldn’t have been as obvious with a bar graph. Once we graphed the data, some relationships were very clear. As predicted, cities with the lowest latitudes had the highest temperatures. But one of the most surprising pieces of data was that cities in the mid-latitudes had the greatest differences between their high and low temperatures. We discussed possible reasons for that. Then we tried sorting the data in different ways. I showed them how they could click a column heading (like high temperature or latitude) to sort by that category. They were surprised how their graphs automatically changed as well. This lead to more interesting discussions. Overall, the students learned a lot about the relationship between latitudes and temperatures that they can take back to their classmates to share with them.