Data representations in a stem context: the performance of catapults

STEM activities have the potential to embed statistics education in meaningful contexts in the elementary years of schooling. This paper reports on part of an extended activity where Grade 4 students were involved in learning about catapults, studying their behavior, and later attempting to improve their performance. After initially collecting data from launching ping pong balls with the catapults, students were given complete freedom to generate representations that could be used to analyze their data to report on the distance the balls travelled and the consistency over a number of trials. The results illustrate the breadth of graph-types students can create when given the opportunity to represent the data in ways most meaningful to them.