Sports Festival

In this post, we are going to deal with the concept of statistics, analysis of data and its application to our school daily activities. Statistics is the science which studies data collection and analysis and it is present in several fields of our life, such as medicine, economy, sports, weather, and also at school. It is really useful to teach statistics to students because it implies understanding, presentation of data and concluding different issues which can be applied in their daily lives later on.

In this case, we will present a functional activity that can be carried out in our school. The context is the following. All the teachers in our school, especially the Physical Education teachers, are concerned about the free time activities that children do nowadays. Instead of playing traditional games or doing sports, they spent the evenings in their bedrooms playing computer games or surfing on the internet, that is, in front of a screen. This can become a really dangerous problem for their health, so the teachers want to organise a “Sports Festival” at school to encourage learners to practise sport as a leisure activity. However, they do not want to select the kind of sports because they do not know which are the students’ preferences.

For this reason, the students of the sixth year of Primary Education are going to do research following the statistical process. They will be divided into five groups and each one will be in charge of the classes of a level. The first step of the process is the collection of data. Each group will write down on a table which is the favourite sport of their classmates.

The second stage is the interpretation of the data collected and its representation in a graphic. In this way, the learners will see perfectly the differences between the most and the less preferable sports in the school. The graphics allow them to observe the information in a different, colourful and easier way. In this case, they will use a bar diagram and a sector one to see the percentages. To create the graphics, they can use the App “Chart draw” which allow them to create different kinds of graphics. You can download it in the following link: Chart Draw App

Finally, it is time to draw conclusions. Our students will draw their conclusions about the sports preferences at school and they will discuss them in a debate with the rest of the teachers in order to organise better the Sports Festival. This activity can help them to improve their oral expression in public with the support of the results represented in the graphics.