Multiple Ways To Graph

Today in class we started a new unit which was statistics which kinda sounds boring to me. How are you suppose to make statistics fun was what I thought before class started. Even though I was thinking to myself that todays class was going to be boring my professor is really good at engaging the class with the lesson. So that days lesson was about data analysis and using different kinds of graphs. Best part with the lesson was we as a class were using M&M's (can you say yummy!) The purpose of the lesson was to use different kinds of graph and see relationships among data that we collected using the M&M's. As a class we received fun sized packets of M&M's but before we opened our package we had to guess how many brown, green, orange, red, blue, and yellow M&M's we think were in our bags. After we guessed and wrote it down we opened our bags counted them and put the M&M's on a pictograph.  After that we shared our data as a class and see if what we predicted was right or wrong. Then we used another graph called a dot plot to graph the classes data. Then after we did that we used yet another graph which was a bar graph to graph the classes data.

 
(Photos provided by me)

What I liked about this activity was that it introduced different graph to graph the same data. What I learned it that pictographs uses well pictures as graph. I believe this graph would be good to use in younger classrooms. Also another thing that I learned is that when you are making a bar graph you have to make sure that the bars are A) spaced out evenly and B) not touching because theres a difference. The difference with that with bar graphs the bars don't touch and if bars do touch then that is a histogram graph. Another thing that I liked about this activity was when we were done we got to eat our M&M's which is like the best part.  Here's a website that shows different graphs including ones I mentioned in this post

Hoped you enjoyed this post!