More than a third of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education.
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It's 8:00am. The kids arrive for their Algebra 1 class. It's a student's turn to check the weather station and record the current values. It's 51F. No measurable rainfall. It is windy though. Wind speed is 18 mph with a peak gust overnight at 35 mph. These values get added to our dataset, increasing our class weather graph. How does this temperature compare to historic temperatures for this day? Is today's temperature greater than the historical mean temperature for this day? Does the graph show the temperature getting warmer over time? Is today's temperature an anomaly (an outlier) or does it fit our model? A student who attends from home can check in to the school website, where the weather station data is presented in real time.
Weather data is a treasure trove of real world information for analysis by STEM classes including math and science, and with students in charge of their own weather station, the data gets personal. Lessons include quantifying local weather trends and investigating climate change. They will graph weather data and discuss weather changes both short term and long term. Can we predict the weather by modeling our data? Are we in a warming trend?
This project benefits my math classes immediately. It is not a consumable, so it will benefit our math and science classes for the next few years at least. It can be made student-centric, putting students in charge of data collection.
Ultimately, I would like our weather station to be used by one of our local news broadcasts, noting the temperature as reported by one of our students.
About my class
It's 8:00am. The kids arrive for their Algebra 1 class. It's a student's turn to check the weather station and record the current values. It's 51F. No measurable rainfall. It is windy though. Wind speed is 18 mph with a peak gust overnight at 35 mph. These values get added to our dataset, increasing our class weather graph. How does this temperature compare to historic temperatures for this day? Is today's temperature greater than the historical mean temperature for this day? Does the graph show the temperature getting warmer over time? Is today's temperature an anomaly (an outlier) or does it fit our model? A student who attends from home can check in to the school website, where the weather station data is presented in real time.
Weather data is a treasure trove of real world information for analysis by STEM classes including math and science, and with students in charge of their own weather station, the data gets personal. Lessons include quantifying local weather trends and investigating climate change. They will graph weather data and discuss weather changes both short term and long term. Can we predict the weather by modeling our data? Are we in a warming trend?
This project benefits my math classes immediately. It is not a consumable, so it will benefit our math and science classes for the next few years at least. It can be made student-centric, putting students in charge of data collection.
Ultimately, I would like our weather station to be used by one of our local news broadcasts, noting the temperature as reported by one of our students.