Have you ever used GeoGebra to explore geometric ideas? Or Desmos to explore functions and graphs? Have you ever thought to yourself, "I wish there was a similar environment for exploring data"? Well folks, I’m here to tell you about a fantastic, free, online tool that does just that – it’s a bit like GeoGebra, but for statistics and data.
Of course, both GeoGebra and Desmos can do far more than just geometry and graphing, with big overlaps between them and some excellent statistics- and probability-focused resources available for each. But neither are designed specifically to make data handling beautiful, interesting and intuitive.
I was fortunate enough to attend the recent Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI) conference at the University of Keele, a 2-day event bringing together enthusiastic mathematics teachers to share ideas and learn from each other and from the people at MEI. The sessions were a cornucopia of mathematical delights with a strong thread of data education woven through the programme like a statistical stamp through a stick of mathematical rock. Sessions with titles such as 'Climate change activities: Are we the last generation or the first sustainable one?', 'Questioning in A-level Statistics, or how I learned to stop worrying and love large data sets', and 'Using Desmos to explore real data in secondary and post-16 mathematics' had me in my happy place immediately.
One session in particular stood out, which was delivered by Tom Button and was entitled 'MEI exploring data with technology resources for key stages 3–4'. In this session, Tom introduced some free resources that MEI has developed which focus on exploring early data science concepts – through familiar representations such as scatter graphs – using a piece of online software called CODAP – Common Online Data Analysis Platform.
I have been aware of CODAP for some years – it has the advantage of being fully online, so as with Desmos and GeoGebra it is free and does not require any installation – but in the past it was not quite as refined as paid-for stats education pedagogical tools such as Tinkerplots. Since I last played with it however, development has continued apace and it is now an excellent classroom resource that can be used to explore, visualise, analyse and communicate with data. A simple interface allows teachers and students to use pre-loaded data or import any new data set they are interested in investigating; then quickly make and break graphs, create hypotheses and test them, and identify features and structures in data such as shape, centre, trend and variation.
Used under the CODAP Terms of Use. Copyright 2018 The Concord Consortium.
As I have written many times in these pages, for over 30 years the recommendations from statistics education researchers have been consistent: students should spend more time exploring real data and posing and answering statistical questions, all supported by technology tools. Until recently, many of the available tools have been clunky (e.g., Excel), costly (e.g., whole school TinkerPlots licenses), or had a high bar to entry (e.g., Python coding). New tools such as CODAP begin to make it a real possibility for teachers to develop more exploratory classroom activities with fewer barriers, and I encourage you to visit the CODAP website and start experimenting with how you can use it to bring your statistics lessons to life! There are many free resources, data sets and ideas available to get started with.
We would love to hear about your experience of exploring statistics with CODAP: tell us about it in the comments below or let us know on social media. And if you were also at the MEI conference, do let us know what your favourite session was, or the best thing that you discovered there.