Academics' Choice Award™ Winner
Dragonistics Data Cards
Ages: 5 - 18Price: $40.00
Type: Toy, Game
By Creative Heuristics Ltd (trading as Statistics Learning Centre)
Description
Students enjoy learning statistics with Dragonistics Data Cards. The data cards make statistics come alive in the classroom.
The Dragonistics deck contains 240 data cards. Each card represents a unique dragon and contains multivariate data about that dragon. Students can explore statistical concepts and gain understanding by sorting and organising the cards. They can directly create tables (Carroll diagrams) and graphs with the cards, allowing them to draw meaningful conclusions.
The data is designed to produce results similar to real datasets allowing students to practice using the statistical enquiry process without the time spent collecting data every time. The dataset is rich, allowing for multiple lessons. The cards can be used over a wide range of curriculum and year levels as they include category, whole-number and measurement data. Physically organising the cards creates a strong connection between the data and data displays: graphs and tables.
The cards are 44x64mm, beautifully designed and with a professional finish. This pack contains 240 cards, which is enough for a whole class. The Dragonistics Data Cards can be used with Statistics Learning Centres free statistics lesson plans and mathematics and statistics learning activities and games. You can find these at shop.StatsLC.com
At higher levels Dragonistics Data Cards can be used to teach sampling, inference and bootstrapping concepts. The difficulty of directly analysing 240 cards leads naturally to analysing a sample of cards to learn about the population. Multiple packs could be used to better highlight the difficulty. Different groups can analyse different samples allowing students to see a range of possible outcomes when results are shared. Lessons can also be tailored to illustrate the effect of sample size or to let students become familiar with the concepts underlying bootstrapping.
Dragonistics Data Cards are ideal as a basis for rich tasks. The rich tasks could focus solely on the mathematics and statistics learning area or broaden cover other learning areas. The students might be creating a documentary about red and green dragons, setting up a 'dragon reserve' to educate the public about dragons or setting up shelters to protect endangered dragons on a small island in the Pacific.
Review Highlights:
The set of 240 Dragonistics cards enabled my daughter to quickly conduct "surveys" and do statistical analysis on the characteristics of a large population of dragons. Each card displays a unique dragon with varying characteristics, including name, size, strength, color, sex, personality, etc. She used the cards to make bar graphs comparing characteristics in her dragon population. She asked herself questions about her dragon population and was able to test her hypotheses (such as female dragons are more cheerful or green dragons are larger than red dragons) by sorting and arranging groups of cards. When I sorted my cards attempting to answer the same question, she learned about sampling error when our conclusions differed.
The Dragonistics cards provided a fun and colorful way to learn about graphing and statistics. Because there are 240 cards in the set, the student is able to quickly survey large sample sizes that might be difficult to access in real life. The cards are sturdy and colorful. They are ideal for making quick bar graphs or sorting into venn diagrams. There are free teaching materials online for the cards that provided ready-to-use learning activities for the cards. The set is designed for classroom use and there are plenty of cards for several groups of children to use, but we found the activities very easy to adapt for individual use as well.
This is an innovative product and I hope to see even more downloadable teaching activities eventually.
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