Iditarod 101: Data Collection and Analysis You Don’t Have to be a Geek, but it Helps By Sally R. Simon
Math – Data Collection, Graphing, and Analysis, Grades 5 and up. Companion to this article, Lesson Plan (PDF Doc.)
Video Clip: Women of the Iditarod, by Sally Simon (Windows Media Player) Mrs. Simon used this clip with students during the 2009 Iditarod.
Topic: Women of the Iditarod
Two days before my 47th birthday I discovered I’m a geek.
It all started the day before, with an empty bulletin board and the decision to start the Iditarod unit earlier than usual. You see, I’m an enrichment teacher and only get once a week for six weeks in February and March to teach the Iditarod unit. However, I’m in charge of a bulletin board near the front lobby of the school. All fall, it challenged students to “Name that Tree” given pictures and clues. Now it needed something new. Something -winter. I decided this would be a great opportunity to expand the Iditarod unit with a “Meet the Mushers” board! Which mushers would be first? I decide to explore the women of the 2009 Iditarod.
I started by going to the Iditarod website and pulling up this year’s musher data. I copied the media picture of each woman musher and bulleted important information from their bios. Noticing it took awhile–there were 16 women– I started to wonder. What is the percentage of women mushers this year? That was easy enough to find out–16 out of 73 –or about 22%. I thought that was interesting, but I really had to get the bulletin board done, so I went into action mode leaving my mathematical thoughts behind. Fast forward to the next morning–a peaceful, snowy Saturday. I was lying in bed and started to wonder, “What percentage of women ran the Iditarod last year compared to this year?” I know, it might sound strange, but that’s what I was thinking. I made myself a cup of coffee, and returned to the Iditarod website. There have to be archives there somewhere, right?
Within minutes, more data* was available at my fingertips than I ever imagined….everything from 1973 to the present—information about every musher and where they lived, who got to what checkpoint, when, even who won the awards for a given year. My heart started to race! OK, I’ll just look up the list from last year to satisfy my curiosity. Before I knew it, I was making a table in Word and collecting data about the women who ran the Iditarod since it began. It was fun. It was exciting, and it gave me ideas for more data research. Questions kept popping into my mind. How many rookies were there each year? How many mushers have been from other countries? Has there ever been a musher from New York, my home state? Who has run the most Iditarod races?
My head was spinning, but I returned to my focus of women mushers. I calculated the percentages of women mushers each year including the starting field and those who finished the race (see attached). When I was done, I looked at the chart and realized the work didn’t stop there. There was analysis to be done. More questions popped into my head like: Why didn’t any women run the Iditarod for several years in a row? Are there any patterns to be found in the data that relate to weather that year? What happened during the 1980 race to make 24 of 60 mushers scratch? It even made me wonder if any women musher has ever run the race while pregnant!
A light bulb went off! If I was this interested and excited by the data, then kids might be too—even middle school kids who sometimes pretend not to be interested in anything. The opportunity to learn how to collect desired data (factual information) and even graph it in several ways using Excel, coupled with the decision making of how to analyze the results (which can be interpreted in many different ways depending on the purpose or audience) is too compelling to pass up! This is the stuff real researchers do, but in a context kids can get excited about! I decided to write the idea up as a lesson plan to share here on the Iditarod website—the place where I got my inspiration. When did I discover I was a geek? When my husband came into the room four hours later, asked me what I was doing, and saw the chart. He didn’t even say anything. He rolled his eyes and left the room. I guess he already knew.
*To access the archived Iditarod data, go to the “Learn About” section, then in the right-hand column click “Past Race Archives.” Go from there, but beware, it may be addicting!
