The purpose of the discussion is to point out the advantage of using a spreadsheet to calculate statistics, especially for very large sets of data. Select students to share their responses and methods for finding the mean from a list of values in a spreadsheet. For further discussion, consider asking these questions:

• "Which part of the process for finding the mean of these values took the most time?" (typing the values into the spreadsheet and making sure they are correct)
• "Often large data sets are collected electronically and automatically added to a spreadsheet. When there are thousands of data values in a spreadsheet, what other advantages do you think might be helpful when using technology to compute the mean?" (It may be difficult to understand the data when there are so many values, so using the spreadsheet to calculate the mean can help in understanding what is typical. It would definitely be faster to use the spreadsheet to calculate the mean than doing it by hand.)
• "What other statistics would be useful and easier to calculate using a spreadsheet?" (If the data set is large or the numbers are difficult to understand at a glance, the median, quartiles, interquartile range, mean absolute deviation, maximum, and minimum should all be easy for a computer to find from a list.)

Direct students' attention to the reference created using Collect and Display. Ask students to share their responses and reasoning. Invite students to borrow language from the display as needed. As they respond, update the reference to include additional phrases.

The purpose of the discussion is to examine the strengths and weaknesses of each of the types of data displays as well as to think about the interval size for histograms and axis marks for ease of reading.

The goal of the lesson is to give students an introduction to navigating technology to calculate statistics and arrange a data display to be informative. Students should understand how to input data into the spreadsheet, create graphical representations, and calculate some statistics. To discuss what they learned, ask:

• “What are some things that technology allowed you to do that will make computing statistics easier in the future?” (After putting the data into the spreadsheet, it is relatively simple to compute the appropriate value, and it can update automatically with new data.)
• "What are some considerations when arranging a data display?" (The scale of the axes, which display type best shows the distribution, and the interval size for histograms are all important to consider when displaying data to be informative.)