Now and Then

This activity gives an opportunity for pupils to examine data and then consider all different kinds of influencing factors in order to predict what will happen another $64$ years on. It can offer a good forum for debate and discussion while sharing views about things that will affect the results. It may help some children to understand that any answer can be deemed 'correct' so long as it can be justified.

 

For many classrooms it would be best to give the results of one event to each group of pupils. They will obviously need opportunities to work as a group and come up with an agreed result. When these results are shared towards the end of the session, there could be some further discussions about the results for one year. This could involve looking at the relationships between the timings for different distances.

What do you think is important about deciding the times for that race?

Tell me about your ideas.

Do the whole group agree? If not, why?

Ask questions such as:
What do you think about these results getting better and better as time goes on?
What about the results in another $100$ years time?
This should give the opportunity for some good creative thoughts to be shared.

Results from other years could also be examined to see whether results steadily improve or whether there are any sudden changes in the patterns. What might be the reasons for this? Children who are beginning to understand what graphs can mean may like to take a look at those in the activity Olympic Records.

 

Some pupils may need help in making sense of the results. They could look at the distances on the sports field to get a real idea of what the distances are like.

It may also be helpful to see what they can do in periods of $10$ secs, $21$ secs, and $22$ secs so that they understand just how quickly these races are being run.