Olympic Games
Wednesday 14 August 2024
Sooooo much to talk about
As I may have mentioned, I live in France, and so the Olympic Games have been pretty close to home. I am sure that Olympic fever has been experienced all over the world. I am also sure that degrees of interest vary hugely amongst subscribers, teachers and students. I find the Olympic games fascinating on so many levels. I love sport so am captivated by the action and beyond that there are so many good questions the whole spectacle raises from political, to practical, to financial to philosophical. The whole thing just makes me think. Here though, I want to focus on the potential there is to bring some of this Olympic fever in to our classrooms! An exhaustive list is surely too difficult... here are some ideas and examples ....
This is an endlessly fascinating notion - is there a limit to how fast we can run? How high we can jump? There are so many events to choose from, analyse and compare. Below are two links to explorations on this theme, the first reacting to a record breaking marathon run and what could happen in the future, the second looks at what happens to record swimming times as the distance increases and then comparing it to their own record swimming speeds. This was a nice new angle on that theme. These are some key questions/ideas,
- If you take an event and look at the history of world records in that event over time, what does the model look like?
- What modelling skills can we employ to find a best fit model that could be used to forecast - understanding the perils of such forecasts outside of the domain for which data exists?
- For distance events, what happens to the current world records as distance increases? How can we model and analyse this?
- How do World records and Olympic records compare? Do they follow similar patterns?
- What does any of this look like if we model 'Best result in the calendar year' against the year? For example, before each event we often see what the 'season best' is.
There are lots of great ToK questions to explore here too and I have written about them on the first link!
Marathon Records
Investigating the possible limits of human endurance. How fast do you think human kind might be able to run a marathon? How has this changed over time and how is it likely to change ion the future? This...
Swimming Speeds
This is an excellent example of a relevant modelling task that draws on the students personal expertise. It develops well from a simple notion and builds from one process to another. Eventually leading...
This is a whole other angle and I have already seen a few images and calculations online. The angle is about the medals table. Everyone acknowledges I think that there are lots of factors that should be considered in any table presented as some kind of hierarchy. Before I post some questions to ask, here are a couple of good links I have used...
1. The Paris medal Table - there is lots of data here and you can see where the medals are won and filter out certain sports to see tables for that data only.
2. Historical medal tables - Going back to Athens in 1896 this is fascinating for stats fans and raises sooooo many questions.
Here are some prompts about remaking medal tables
- Should they be ordered by gold or total medals?
- Is it possible to create a points system that would deal with the above?
- What happens if 4th, 5th, etc are considered in the same way?
- Whatever you do with the above, what does the medal table look like if you factor in population of the country? ie if you order it in terms of medals per capita. This is surely relevant.
- What if you order it somehow as a function of GDP and/or GDP per capita?
- Digging a little deeper than general wealth, what if we look at per capita spending on sport? This is a great question about the impact that investment in sport would have on such results.
- What if we look at the gender divide and compare it to gender equality?
- There are then a whole host of serious social indicators to explore.
Why do any or all of this? No good reason if it doesn't motivate you, but I suppose such a high profile 'global' event that is often described as the world coming together as one, seems to me to be an opportunity to publicise the differences, and inequalities there are in the world. The Olympic Games is anything but a level playing field.
Way back when the games were in London in 2012 I did an exercise with students aimed at producing some impactful infographics to show some of the above. The idea hinged on a loose notion that the 5 rings once represented 5 geographical areas of the world and then averages from the countries in each area were represented by rings of a different size. It was an excellent project and provided some really provocative results. I am gearing up to do something like this for September! Follow the link for more... some highlights are below
Olympic Circles
'Making infographics based on the Olympic Circles - Is it really a level playing field?'' The five circles of the Olympic emblem were originally designed to represent the five participating continents...
The area of the circle is proportional to the average GDP per capita for each of the regions
The area of the circle is proportional to the average population for each of the regions