You will work in groups of four. One student will be the weather reporter. He/she will use the weather sites listed (or other sites) to report the weather in a given city to the rest of the team. The other students choose either mean, median, or mode and range (often times there will be no mode). Be sure that all group members use the same data, from the same cities, when reporting.

Phase 1 - Background Information
The sites listed below (in bold print) are important because they will provide basic information about the topic as a whole. Everyone should explore these sites before starting your Task. Take your time, relax and enjoy. Do not spend too much time on any one site.

• Funbrian
• Kidzone
• Hotlist of good mathsites for kids
• Data Webquest

Phase 2 - Roles
These roles were chosen because they each define the most important elements of Mathematical Data. Each of you will choose a particular role with links and instructions below. Here are the general instructions for all of you. Please see your specific instructions and questions below.

Roles - There are four roles.
1. Choose a role. You are either the reporter, the mean finder, the median finder, or the mode and range finder.
2. Use the information you attain from the internet sites to report the data. How to put it together is described below in Phase 3.

Weather Reporting:

• Weather Studio
• The Weather Channel
• National Weather Service
• Yahoo Weather

The above sites are for the weather reporter. Look at all these sites, but choose one to use for your teams data. Pick a city and find seven days of weather reporting (forcasts) and use the temperature data to find the mean, median, mode, and range of temerature for that seven day forcast.

Mathematical Data Mean Median Mode Range:

• Cool Math Sites
• Allmath
• About Mathematics
• Math Forum
• Elementary School Math
• AAA math
• Cool Math 4v Kids
• Math worksheet generator

Use these links to find information about mathematical data. You may use other sites that you find as well.

Phase 3 - Reaching Consensus
You all should have completed your part on your research project on mean, median, mode and range and their practical use in the area of weather. Now put it together. Choose a typist to type your findings on Microsoft Word.

1. Give a definition of mean, median, mode, and range. Each role player gives his/her definition.

2. Identify the city who's weather you are collecting data for. Give the dates you are collecting data for (i.e. 10/21/08 through 10/28/08 totaling seven (7) days of data).

3. List the mean
median
mode
range

You may use Farenhieght F or Celsius C. You may round to nearest degree or less.

4. You may embelish your paper with pictures, sounds, movies, etc. that relate to the project. Any illustrations or media must be appropriate for a school setting.

5. List your role players and their roles.

---

Conclusion

Now you have completed your WebQuest. You have exposed yourself to the vastness of the World Wide Web, and made sense out it. You have ciphered through way too much information and came to some simple, basic conclusions.

So, how is the weather outside today? Not such an easy question to answer with specifics? Hopefully you now understand that the preceeding question requires a reference of time, place, aspect of weather such as rainfall, wind, or in our case, temperature, and a mathematical way of expressing your answer. Hopefully you have gained an appreciation for weather reporting, the mathematics necessary for making sense of a large group of data, and the delicate power of the web.

---

Content by Mr. Hake, d.hake@hotmail.com http://www.kn.att.com/wired/fil/pages/webmathematdh.html Last revised Tue Mar 24 11:19:15 US/Pacific 2009