The purpose of this activity is for students to collect information, or data, about their class and discuss how to organize it in a way that others will understand. Students learn how to conduct a survey to gather data. They use connecting cubes to physically represent each answer in a survey. Using cubes this way builds on the work students did in previous lessons sorting objects and representing categories. During the Activity Synthesis, students discuss how to organize the cubes so others can more easily determine how many are in each category.

Students will need access to the data represented by connecting cubes in the next activity. Leave the cubes in a location where students can easily access them.

• Share responses.
• Group the cubes the ways students suggest.
• “What does each cube represent?” (1 student’s vote in the survey.)
• “How does organizing the cubes into categories help us show the data from our class survey?” (It’s easier to show how many people voted for each choice.)

The purpose of this activity is for students to represent on paper the class data collected during the previous activity. In that activity, the data was represented by cubes. Now students determine how they want to represent their data on paper. Representations may include squares (as cubes), tally marks, or number symbols. Students also label their representations.

• “In the last activity, we represented our survey data with cubes. In this activity, we represented the data on paper. What is the same about both representations?" (They show the same data. They show the same 3 categories.)
• “Now let’s see what we can learn about the representations of our class data.”

The purpose of this activity is for students to interpret the representations created in Activity 2. As the data is the same for each representation, students can focus on discussing how the representations are alike or different (MP3). In this way, students build on their work describing how objects were sorted and represented in categories. Now, students apply similar skills and language while working with a new data context.

Students will notice that all the representations show the same data with the same three categories. They may also notice similarities in the number of votes for each category and make connections between representations. Students may notice that the representations are different as some use drawings and others use tally marks or numbers. Students may also notice that the categories are in a different order.

• Display selected student representations from the previous activity.
• “What is the same about these representations? What is different?” (The number of votes for each category is the same. The way that groups represented the number of votes is different.)
• “There are different ways to represent our data, but no matter the representation, the data should tell the same story.”