Exploring Computer Science Lesson 5-2 Research Questions Exploring Computer Science Lesson 5-2

Objectives The student will be able to: Understand the complexities of collecting, processing, and analyzing large sets of data. Describe the expectations of the final project. Explore data sets related to sample final project topics. Identify research questions that could be answered or stories that could be told from the data. Select topic for the final project.

From Last Time… In your groups, think about the data from last time: What do you wish Mr. Schmidt thought about before starting the Room Data Collection Project? Do you think it’s possible to think of everything ahead of time? If not, what steps can you take to make sure that you can recover from missteps? Any other data you wish Mr. Schmidt had collected from the outset? Anything you wish he had specified more clearly before collecting data? When designing a method for collecting a large set of data using multiple sources, what kinds of things do you need to think about? As a group – Create a Google or Word document and turn this in. Print the Google sheet with your room data from last time and turn it in.

Final Project As a class we need to choose from one of these topics: Topic 1 – School Safety and Bullying Topic 2 – Exercise and Health Topic 3 – Teens, Social Media and Online Behavior Topic 4 – Teens, Video Games and Civic Engagement

Data Sets Look at the data sets in today’s homework section: Mobilize_SchoolSafety_2011 Mobilize_ExerciseHealth_2011 Mobilize_MediaBehavior_2011 Mobilize_GamesCivic_2008 For each data set answer the following questions in your Journal: How many lines are in the data set? What question can be answered from this data? What question would you like the answer to but requires more information?

Pick a Research Question As a class you need to pick a topic for the final project and get the data to answer a Research Question You can all work on the same Research Question Benefit is a larger data set Each group can pick a different Research Question but all within the same topic. In your groups look at the questions you came up with for each topic. Pick the best question from each topic and the best question overall. Present your best question to the class.