BrainPOP Science Data Manipulatives: Interactive-Explanatory data experiences for MS Science
By: Kristin Hunter-Thomson
Looking for more interactive ways to get your students to engage with data towards a specific science learning objective?
Screen shot of freely available Data Manipulative. Students can select which years display for the “Water Used per Day” variable ad learn how the data were collected.
Consider checking out the recently launched (Summer 2021) BrainPOP Science Data Manipulatives. This new Feature accompanies the new Investigation packages of other science activities as well as cover stand alone topics.
Check out their freely available Sample Investigation about “How can water be used to generate electricity?” at: https://science.brainpop.com/investigation/water-power.
The Data Manipulative is an additional resource that you can add or visit directly via https://science.brainpop.com/investigation/water-power/player/water-supply-dm/.
There is a driving question for the data experience: How have Americans used their water supply over time? Use the bar charts below to look for patterns! To answer this driving question students are able to interact with the data in the graph (it isn’t just static!) and answer some guiding questions (below what is visible in the screen shot). The students need to make choices based on what they see while visualizing the data in various ways on the page to answer the guiding question towards a pre-identified pattern in the data that aligns with content learning objectives.
Interactive-Explanatory data experiences, such as this, enable students to practice making data decisions for different data moves, while keeping tighter boundaries on the experience than completely open-ended data exploration. The students are able to interact with the data, within specific pre-set limits, to make sense of what the data say in relation to the activity questions more than with just static graphs, where they are just making sense of data after someone else made all of the data decisions and moves with the data.
If you want to learn more about Interactive-Explanatory data experiences, as well as the three other ways that we can incorporate different graphing experiences into our classroom instruction, check out the July/August 2021 NSTA’s Science Scope Data Literacy 101 article: How Can We Use and Interact with Graphs Better?
Give this freely available activity a try and see how it goes with your students! If you like it, reach out and we can help you find more activities like this out there for you.
*Note, while we worked with BrainPOP to create these Data Manipulatives we receive NO financial compensation for referring you. As of October 2021, they are still looking for early adopters if you are interested in using some of the other 45+ Data Manipulatives, reach out to BrainPOP Science.
