Maths Careers: Big Data Careers
This collection contains a range of teaching materials to support the Maths Careers article 'Big Data Careers: An overview of a growth area for mathematical jobs' by Hazel Lewis.
The resource collection includes a link to the full article, resources to explore large data sets in real-life contexts.
- ALL
- Article
- Interactive resource
- Information sheet
- Activity sheet
- External link
- Other
Article
Number crunching
This edition of Big Picture entitled Number Crunching, has a number of articles explaining how statistics help us understand the world.
Interactive resource
How Risky Is Life?
In this activity, students explore the miss-match between real and perceived risk by exploring the risks of dying unexpectedly from various causes. The emphasis is on order-of-magnitude comparisons, reflecting the various kinds of variation in risk level between individuals and over time.
Students are offered opportunities to interpret very large and very small numbers, use appropriate orders of magnitude, and use a range of representations including tables and graphs of data, probabilities and distributions and to explore random variation and statistical inference from data.
Information sheet
Maths career profiles
This booklet has been provided by More Maths Grads and it is designed to highlight the versatility of mathematics and to show that a degree in the mathematical sciences can take students anywhere; it can open doors, from developing software technologies to being a professional rugby league player. Working on exciting and innovative projects, mathematicians are highly valued and an essential element of any successful team.
Activity sheet
Debate kit - big data
This kit is designed to facilitate a structured debate about whether we should sequence the genomes of a million people in order to find out more about living longer and healthier. The different ‘rounds’ of the debate help students think through the issues when collecting large, sensitive data and reconsider their opinions.
External link
Big Data Careers: An overview of a growth area for mathematical jobs
"More data is being stored and generated than ever before. Every time you send an e-mail, pay by credit card, visit the doctor or even switch on your smartphone you are generating data. In 2013 there were approximately 4.4 trillion gigabytes of data globally which is equivalent to 120 movies stored on DVD for every person on earth. It is predicted that the amount of data is expected to increase by 40% every year for the next ten years."
Hans Rosling- the joy of stats
Hans Rosling's famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport's commentator's style to reveal the story of the world's past, present and future development.
Other
Census at School
The CensusAtSchool project provides access to large and meaningful data sets for classroom use.
This collection of resources from the project covers the whole primary and secondary age range. They have been written to help teachers use CensusAtSchool data in their classrooms, most are in worksheet format but many include data sets that run in Excel. A few solutions are also included.
