Promoting 21st Century Skills through studying Statistics at School farm

Gayaza girls studying statistics at School farm.

Statistics is the collection, presentation, interpretation and analysis of data; this is a common saying of most Mathematics teachers the world over and Uganda in particular. However the question to ask is can Mathematics be taught outside class for some topics like Statistics and trigonometry using the locally available materials; the answer is yes because schools are surrounded by many learning materials.

Gayaza High School girls have had to take their statistics lessons to the school farm. At the farm there is a mathematics garden started by Mr. Ddungu Ronald, the deputy principal and the garden belong to 12th grade students. Each girl has a Banana plant with a name tag for easy identification and the plants are planted in rows and columns which makes teaching coordinate geometry easy. This kind of garden has been emulated by other classes and almost every girl in the school owns a plant. However my grade 9 class was interested in using the garden to study statistics; they wanted to collected data from this garden.

They are grouped and rolled out by borrowing meter rulers from the school physics laboratory and these are used for measuring the circumference of the Banana plants. This is one way of using the locally available materials to enhance studies.

For uniformity they use the shortest person in the group as reference and she is supposed to stand near the plant whose circumference is being sought of and a string would be wound around the plant using her height as a reference. Thereafter the string would be stretched on a meter ruler to measure the distance which would be recorded to the nearest centimeter as a circumference. This process was repeated for more plants until a total of 40 plants was sampled. The data collected is tabulated in a frequency table.

This table now reflects what teachers usually give in class. Students appreciate it more if they participate in data collection since it equips them with data collection skills. There are so many examples around a school setting that can be used to create activities that would foster learning where necessary e.g measuring the weights of students in class, recording their heights, etc. Activities of this kind and many others are what teachers should include in their lessons to make them a reality.

Having tabulated the data from the farm, a lot of deductions can be made from them. The students can calculate the mean, mode, median circumference and even presentations can be made like Histogram, Ogive (Cumulative frequency curve), e.t.c

All this work can be done using ICT where different groups will be given a chance to present their work to the rest of the members. The groups can also be guided on how to create wikis so as to share their work online.