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Lesson 6: What Do I Eat?

Lesson 6: What Do I Eat? [The Data Cycle: Consider Data]

Objective

You will collect data using paper and pencil to understand the challenges of organizing, storing, and sharing data. You will learn that there must be an agreement about the variables that need to be recorded in order to attain consistency.

Vocabulary

data set(s)

Essential Concepts

Lesson 6 Essential Concepts

After raising statistical questions, we examine and record data to see if the questions are appropriate.

ATTENTION

For every single lesson:

Answer the questions in red font in your Introduction to Data Science (IDS) Journal.

Lesson

  1. Today’s lesson will focus on the Data Collection component of the Data Cycle.

  2. You will watch a short video of an episode of Jamie Oliver’s show titled Food Revolution found at: https://youtu.be/I0vYwqkoktM. This particular video was recorded at a Los Angeles high school.

    1. As you watch the video, write down in your IDS Journal your comments and/or reactions to what you see and hear.

    2. After jotting down your comments and/or reactions, respond to the following question:

      Why should I care about what I eat?

  3. Think back to the Stick Figures activity from Lesson 2. During that activity, you collected data about other people; but today you are going to be collecting data about yourself and the foods you eat.

  4. You should have Nutrition Facts labels available from food/snacks you consumed at home between the previous lesson and today.

    Note: You can also use some of the Nutrition Facts Cutouts instead:


  5. Just as you did with the Stick Figures, collect any data that you can from the labels and record it in your IDS Journal.

  6. Below you will find other students' data collection from labels. Once you have collected your facts, compare and contrast your data with these other students' data collections by responding to the following:

    1. How are your data sets similar?

    2. How are your data sets different?

  7. Notice that while some facts collected were the same, there were others that were collected by some students and not by others. Also notice that there are differences in the variables collected and the data structure used.

    1. How can the data you just gathered be quickly displayed and easily read?

    2. Use the Food Habits Data Collection handout to record the nutritional information for the snacks that you have consumed. You will be submitting this data in the next lesson.

      Click on the document name to download a fillable copy of the Food Habits Data Collection handout (LMR_1.8).

  8. Each column in the Food Habits Data Collection table represents a variable that was collected about your snack. For example, the first column, “What’s the name of your snack?” is simply the name of your snack. So a short, descriptive identifier for the first column is "Name".

  9. Write a short (one-word preferred) identifier for each variable on your Food Habits Data Collection handout or in your IDS Journal.

  10. In the next lesson you will begin collecting and recording data. To be prepared for this, make sure to have your mobile device or other device with an internet browser or app capability.

Reflection

What are the essential learnings you are taking away from this lesson?

Homework

Examine the data in your Food Habits Data Collection handout and generate two simple and two complex statistical questions that you think can be answered by the data you have collected. A simple statistical question involves one variable, whereas a complex statistical question involves two or more variables.