Our Finished Kobe Bryant 81 Point Game Graphs

The 5th grade recently completed a neat little data activity, one I posted on awhile back titled Kobe Bryant Teaches Data Collection and Analysis. I'm going to restate some of what is said in that post, and provide the links again. First we started out by viewing the video that you will see embedded at the bottom of the post. Students were each given a slip titled Kobe Stat Sheet (you can download the Excel document for this by clicking the link).

From there, students had to graph how many Kobe Bryant scored in his historic 81 point performance back in 2006. We kept data by minutes in each quarter, and used that completed data to make some different graphs. 

It's important for students to know the purpose of each graph type (some students had been led to believe that you can use any type of graph for any purpose, it was just up to personal preference, and that is not true). Here is a simple explanation from nces.ed.gov.

So once the data was collected, students had a line plot that looked like this:

From this data, they completed a line graph showing point growth over the course of the game:

They made a pie chart showing the percentage of Laker points in the game scored by Kobe:

And they made bar graphs showing the top 10 scoring games in NBA history (that one can be seen at the top of the final photo). 

Finally, here is the Youtube video we used:

We Are Small

Today I was thinking about what it is that makes us feel so small. Our students, mostly still egotistical children, don't conceptualize the greater world and universe that exists out there. I like to take a moment each year with my students and discuss the concept of other people, other cultures, and the fact that our lives are quite small in the scheme of things, and that we must make every effort to become productive members of society, and to learn to co-exist with others.

But yeah, it's hard to get this concept across in a simple little lecture, so I like to show these amazing, world-view-defining videos. So, for tonight, enjoy:

Ascent, by Brian Eno: This amazing little piece of music that is accompanied with photos of the earth. Its 4 minutes really put me at ease and show me how small we really are.

Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan: If you want to prove that we're a speck of dust out there in the universe, here you go: