Over the past year Braden has struggled some with math
concepts. Not that he would get it wrong, but he truly was not taking the time
to understand why an answer was the answer. He didn’t take the time because he
didn’t find it fun, or the subjects in word problems did not interest him.
Because let’s face it, who cares that Sally had two brothers that were 7 years
older than her.
And then it dawned on me one day ~ math is just data
aggregated up and down in different ways at the end of the day. AKA – the thing
I do every day for work. So I put on my thinking cap and tried to figure out
how I could use what I do to help Braden. Then Voila- Long division with NASA.
He loves one of those two things =)
The concept is simple. Using Tableau (A data visualization
tool we use at work, but a limited function public version is free online I
believe) I took a set of data I found on the internet about astronauts and put
together a set of questions and answers. The questions appear in a drop down on
the left hand side of the screen. The numbers that go into calculating the
answers can all be found on screen. For example, average hours per flight. We
list the total space flights and the total space flight hours on the page. What
I do is have Braden find his numerator and denominator and calculate his answer
on paper first. He then plugs his numerator and denominator in to the sheet and
voila – an answer appears for him to check his work. The answer does not appear
in a percentage format, so that is one extra step I’ve added in with him since
5th grade math also focuses on moving decimals. I make him transform
his answer into a percentage. Then we pick another question and start again.
This visualization helps him understand the inner workings
of division, but it also helps him understand how to read word problems and
pull out the correct data.
At the bottom right of the page there is a section for
Metadata. Those links contain graphs with other related data. You can also use
this data to have the student create their own questions and find the answers.
The Data Sheet is a crosstab of all the data used to create the graphs.
Really this is easy to do with any data set, but I found
that allowing Braden to visually see things in this format helped him
understand the concepts much more. It is also data that he is interested in, so
it held his interest and led to other types of critical thinking questions (“Why
are there so many less women”). We could then use our data to look at graphs to
understand the answer to his question, so a hint of science was also brought
in.
