Explorations

Explorations are open-ended data investigations designed to get your students exploring and asking questions of data in the same way that professional scientists do! What does this look like? Much like our structured lessons, each Exploration comes with a teacher guide, slide deck, and student worksheet; however, with Explorations, students build their own data visualizations as they seek to answer their own questions and ideas. After learning about a featured scientist's story via the teacher slide deck, students connect to and explore a subset (2-3 attributes/variable) of this same scientist's dataset in an NSF-funded tool called CODAP. Students are asked to document 1-2 of the data visualizations they build in CODAP on their student worksheets and then share their noticings/wonderings with the class. Evidence and new questions generated during this whole class share out should be added to a public record that then leads to another round of data exploration with additional variables (4-6 attributes) in CODAP as part of level 2. This process continues, ultimately culminating in students constructing their own argument from evidence using the claim-evidence-reasoning structure.

Included below are some teacher-facing explorations. Our new student-facing Explorations are coming soon!