TQ #7: Gapminder

I must admit, when I first took a look at this website- I was sooo excited about it. At the current point in my curriculum at school, we were working on interpretting graphs. It was my plan that this website would be awesome in order to show students the real-life examples that they so often ask for. I was so excited to show my students how graphs can be such wonderful tools to organize and display data. I was also so excited to have them all working on a topic that interested them while on the same website; asking similar but different questions.-talk about differentiation. The possibilities were endless and my excitement was overwhelming. I was so interested to show this to one of my boss's but boy, am I glad, that I did not invite them in...

The night before the lesson where I was going to have the students work on interrpreting the graphs from gapminder.org/world, I explored the website and pulled out the variables that 7th grade students might find interest in exploring. Here's the list that I posted on the board for the students to choose two variables to compare:
Income per person
Infant mortality rate
Children per woman
Life expectany at birth
CO2 emissions
Sugar consumption per person
Female labour force
Military expenditure
Total income
Primary school completion (girls/ boys)
Ratio of girls to boys in primary and secondary ed
Literacy rate (adults and children)(girls/boys/ total)
Population
Children and elderly (per adults)
Surface area
Paved roads
Urban population
Mortality rate
Health issues (etc)
Electricity/ Oil consumption
Cell phone use
Internet users
Poverty
Export/Import of goods and services

Each student choose two variables, I set them off to start up the computers and head to the website with some time to explore on their own. The students choose wonderful comparisons and I was really interested to see the connections they could make. UN-fortunately, my excitement fell short when all we could view was a grey screen. Usually most websites are very compatible with Mac computers and I thought this one would be the same- I checked it briefly in the morning to make sure that it wasn't blocked and thought that things would be a go. Unfortunately I have still not been able to complete this lesson plan with the students and as much as I don't like assigning homework that can't be done at school- I did, just so that I could share the excitement of this powerful tool with some of my students.

All in all, I think this tool, when working properly, has loads of organized information that is able to be understood by many, many children. By having the ability to choose variables that interest/ that student can relate to really gives a powerful edge to this program. By being able to view the 'continent areas' (used loosely as they were generally continents but not always) in different colors, your statements can be very general in that you see the majority trends of that area. But then, you are able to be very specific/ selective in order to view just one country and watch/track it's trends. The connections that students could make to graphs are endless and the connections that they can make the real world could potentially be a very persuasive tool to show the change that may need to be made. I've put in a work-order in order to hopefully provide the students their chance to really engage in a discussion based on this website.

As far as limitations, I would be concerned about all of the different variables that students can choose. Some are very appropriate for all ages but there are a view that could be viewed as providing too much information for some young minds. There are some graphs that have limited data but I think that proves an interesting tool in order to promote reasonable estimations based on the trends that we are able to uncover. Overall, I am definitely looking forward to the time when I can share this tool with my students during our graphing unit.