Abstract:

The University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro (UTAD) is located in a Campus of excellence with relevant botanical value, including escarpments with its terraces facing the Corgo river, traces of natural forest, arboretum and garden areas surrounding the buildings that integrate the Botanical Garden, which supports and inspires scientific activities and teaching.

In the Campus, there are services and educational support infrastructures that facilitate students' everyday life and contribute to learning success. UTAD has also information technologies and scientific activities, as well as leisure and sports spaces. Throughout its three decades of existence, and with eyes set on the future and the world, UTAD opens its doors in the summer and facilitates to the youngsters its’ physical structures, magnificent landscaped amphitheaters, and the scientific and technological infrastructures. This year, young people ages from nine to 16 participated during five days in the summer initiative “UTAD Junior 2019”.

We agree with Turkay and Adinolf (2012) that stated that:
“If people are motivated to do something, it is likely that they will be willing to spend time on it and they may learn from it. That is why people spend hours on hobbies like playing games, and game designers are responsible from what kind of learning can be gained from games.” Pfannkuch (2008) has also referred that: “Students are given little opportunity to play, what I like to call, the game of statistics in an exploratory data analysis environment.”

Therefore, as data analysis teachers, we proposed and led a workshop about data analysis with a group with ages from 9 to 11 participants of “UTAD Junior 2019”. Our main goal was to involve the participants in probability mobile games, as well as in statistical analysis of data, in order to review some of their scholar knowledges in a very funny morning. It was an active approach to learn statistics in summer time. After installing the app “Probability for Kids” in their mobiles, they played the games, remembering some of the probability concepts: certain, impossible, more likely, and less likely.

Meanwhile, one of the teachers was collecting the participants´ personal data (gender, age, height, month of birth, favorite sport on TV, shoe size number, and their opinion about liking cycling, using a 4-point Likert scale). Afterwards, in groups of four participants they had to construct graphs and compare them in order to describe the group of participants. Next, colored ropes were placed on the floor to exemplify data partitions, Venn diagrams, and Carroll diagrams. Finally, participants filled a small survey with their opinions about the workshop.

This work has a qualitative and descriptive nature (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2011) and we aim to report our experience and how it may be used in the classroom in order to engage students in data analysis using their “own” data as recommended for classroom (e.g. in line with Pfannkuch, 2008).

Keywords:

Data Analysis, Summer School, Activity, Pupils.