In the following video we are joined by Dr. Alfie Ziegler from Osnabruek University in Germany who is a physics professor and helps us design kinetic learning activities to teach higher level math and science. In the video Professor Alfie shows us an activity he came up with to teach Rupert kinetically how to calculate mean, median and mode.
The activity shown in the video above is not how we taught basic statistics to Rowan for the simple reason that he has no interest in building fires and in fact actively dislikes it viewing it as an unnecessary chore. So for Rowan we used one of Rowan's favorite activities –driving out to his favorite roads and counting cars – to teach this same subject. What we did was drive out to Rowan's five favorite roads and found a safe place to pull over. We then counted how many cars passed us in a five minute period four times and recorded the results. We then calculated the mean, median and average number of cars that passed us for each road and presented the results in a graph (see attached document). The point here as always is you will be most successful if you find a way to incorporate your child's interests (whatever they may be) into this activity.