Statisitics - Key Stage 3
Here are some of the favourite activities selected by the NRICH team.
- M, M and M If you are given the mean, median and mode of five positive whole numbers, can you find the numbers?
- Unequal Averages Play around with sets of five numbers and see what you can discover about different types of average...
- Wipeout Can you do a little mathematical detective work to figure out which number has been wiped out?
- Olympic Records Can you deduce which Olympic athletics events are represented by the graphs?
These are just a few of the activities on Handling Data that you can find on the NRICH curriculum pages.
The activities below, taken from the STEM Learning website, complement the NRICH activities above.
Statistical Calculations
Page 3 onwards of this material could be used to support the NRICH M, M and M resource. The questions sheet starts out by posing the relatively straight forward question of finding 5 numbers with a mean of 10. Additional constraints are then added with questions 1 to 4 serving as a lead in to the NRICH problem, questions 5 to 7 developing the ideas further.
There is a challenge section at the end that asks students if they can find four positive integers such that mean < mode < median, and to explain their answer.
Averages
This activity is helpful for reinforcing the ideas of mean, mode, median, and range. It uses the format of the 'Top Trumps' card game. It would be useful to use in advance of students working on the NRICH activity M, M and M.
Sequences
These materials can be used to give an introduction to the activity M, M and M which can be tackled by using the sum of the first n positive integers and triangular numbers.
Using Graphs
This resource supports the Olympic Records NRICH activity. The materials could be used either as an introduction to the NRICH activity, or to supplement it.
This SMILE resource contains two packs of games, investigations, worksheets and practical activities supporting the teaching and learning of how students use graphs mathematically, from reading information from a graph to using graphs to show distance, velocity and acceleration.
