Topic: Spreadsheets for Inquiry

~~~~~Learn~~~~~

Spreadsheets are often used by teachers for calculating grades and other administrative tasks, but they can also be quite powerful when appropriately put in the hands of learners. An interesting topic can quickly lead to an intriguing investigation, but it still takes a good teacher to make a topic interesting.

What is inquiry-based learning? Here is an overview of what inquiry learning is all about.

With inquiry-based learning, a "hook" is used to draw the student into the problem and begin asking questions. If you've sparked students' interests, then it shouldn't be difficult to elicit questions from them.

Today you will experience first hand the power of using spreadsheets to help answer real-world scientific questions.

~~~~~Practice and Assignment~~~~~

The Hook. Begin by spending a few minutes with your instructor exploring why studying climate and weather can be so interesting. View this Power Point presentation on climate and weather together.

The presentation raised several questions about the differences and similarities between the climates of San Francisco, Colorado Springs, Dodge City, and Norfolk, such as:

Which city has the highest yearly average temperature?
Which city has the hottest summers?
Which city has the coldest yearly average temperature?
Which city has the coldest winters?
And the most important question under girding all these questions is why?

You might have asked other questions as well, such as where does it rain the most or least? You will tackle just the temperature questions in this activity.

Inquiry begins here...

We have all these wonderful questions but no answers. We need data to help us answer these questions, but where do we get it? The Web, of course!

Spend the next 10 minutes putting your refined Internet searching skills to the test. Find a site that gives you monthly average temperatures for the four cities in question (San Francisco, Colorado Springs, Dodge City, and Norfolk).

If you have trouble finding the data, you might want to try WorldClimate.com. It allows you to hunt down data for thousands of weather stations around the world. Your instructor might ask all of you to use data from this site.

If you used WorldClimate.com your data will look something like this. Data by itself, however, does not answer our questions. We need to get this data in a spreadsheet so that we can play with it some. Sometimes getting the data into a spreadsheet is as easy as copying and pasting it into a spreadsheet. Other times you have to do it the old fashioned way...you have to type in the data by hand. In this case since there are only 48 data points to worry about it's not a big deal, but do factor in enough time with your students to get data entered. Remember to label your rows and columns appropriately.

NOTE: If you instructor thinks your class is strapped for time, you might be asked to download this pre-created Excel file with the data already entered. This spreadsheet is data only. Using the appropriate formulas, you still need to:

• Calculate the average temperature for each city
• Calculate the average temperature for each month

Present the Data

Often charts tell a story that data and calculated formulas alone cannot. Month-to-month temperatures simulate continuous data, so what type of chart should we choose? Hopefully you answered "line chart."

There are a variety of comparisons that you might want to make, so discuss with your instructor what you think needs to be charted.

If you wanted to compare all four cities to each other you probably created a chart that looks something like this:

Is it any easier to answer our questions now? What are the answers?

Inquiry begets Inquiry

Often the answers you come up with cause you to ask more questions. For example, why is Dodge City really hot in the summer and really cold in the winter? Why is Colorado Springs generally cooler than the other three cities?

Probably most intriguing is San Francisco's weather. Why is it so much different than the other three cities? San Diego's weather is much like San Francisco's. Spend a little bit of time on the web trying to figure out why San Francisco has hotter falls than summers. Haven't you ever wondered why we experience this too?

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