Gapminder: Gapminder is an extremely user-friendly data visualization program. It gives the user world-wide data sets on everything from nuclear energy to life expectancy, and a very easy-to-use interface for representing and even animating the data. Want to see how population and carbon emissions have changed over time? Select those data sets from the drop down menu and press play. How you use it depends on what you're teaching and your students capabilities.
- Can You Explain That? Have students put one data set on the X-axis and another on the Y-axis. You could assign them a data set or let them choose their own. In either case, challenge them to provide an explanation for what they see. This could prompt a discussion about causality and correlation. Is there a relationship between the number of cars and the number of traffic fatalities? Why is it so high in some countries? Math, reasoning, writing and research skills are all marshaled with this activity.
- Where's the Data? In some cases, there's no data from a country. Why don't we know the average income of a North Korean?
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