Unit 2 Lesson 7 Introduction to Data

What brain type are you? http://www.zimbio.com/quiz/3FlNH9tImJ4/How+Much+Left+Right+Brained+Person Its on my website

People say there is data all around us. What do you think that means People say there is data all around us. What do you think that means? Brainstorm as many examples of data as you can think of. Who is generating the data? Where is the data being stored or saved? Who owns it? Examples: …

Examples cell phone data plans science experiments GPS tracking online shopping data taxes or accounting info sports data

In this unit we will how to use, manipulate and visualize data with computational tools. Sometimes the computer itself generate data for us -But there are other kinds of data that can’t be generated by the computer. data about people and how they act in the real world is hard to capture without just asking them. So that’s what a lot of tools online do. They try to capture people’s responses to things because the data, in aggregate, might contain useful information that could be extracted.

That “dumb” online quiz you took at the beginning of class is an example. These quizzes ask people to reveal things about themselves, their preferences, likes and dislikes. This is data! While these online quizzes are probably innocuous, some interesting things about people could probably be discovered if the data were analyzed. As a class, we’re going to do something similar…

As our first adventure into data, each of you is going to complete a short survey. Surveys are one of the best ways to collect data from people, and they are functionally no different from an online poll, funny quiz, or anything else that asks you for your opinion. We’re going to use our own survey, so that we can collect and see all the data

What do you notice? What was surprising? What do the results tell you about you and your answers? What other information would you like? What kind of questions would we need to ask to find out more information?

You are going to complete this survey every day in class for the next several weeks. By the end, we should have several hundred entries. You’ve seen the questions and have taken a quick glimpse at the results. What do you think we might be able to find out in a few weeks?

Write down one or two hypotheses (predictions) about what we might be able to find out about our class, assuming that everyone fills out this survey every day for a few weeks. Hypotheses: A proposed explanation for some phenomenon used as a basis for further investigation.