Introduction
An exhibition 'If the World Were a Village' has been scheduled to open at the 2016 Maths Olympiad, organisers need some exhibits. The exhibits are going to be based upon data representing the demographics of our nations, cities and schools and we will compare these with the figures for the planet.
We are going to use the model of a village of 100 people, because this allows us to display our data sets as percentages.
Students, You must be thoughtful about how the data is going to presented because sometimes key messages can be missed out because of the way the data are shown. So you must first be able to explain to your teacher why you have chosen the presentation method you eventually did.
Over the lifetime of the project we expect students throughout the partnership to use the Chat facility and the forums to let you share your ideas with your partners, support each other and to compare your data.
Overview
The world's population (6,660,000,000) is represented in the imaginary village of 100 residents so that each resident represents approximately 67 million people from the real world. If the village, there are 100 people: 61 people are from Asia; 13 are from Africa; 12 are from Europe; 8 are from South America, Central America and the Caribbean; 5 are from Canada and the United States; 1 is from Oceania. How shall we represent this?
Is a table going to illustrate the figures clearly or would you use a Pie Chart or a Bar graph, All of these can show exactly the same information.
Which representation makes you realise that there are 100 people? Which one makes you realise that there are a lot more people from Asia, Which was easiest to count? Did you notice how a flag had been used because that was linked to the topic?
Your challenge will be to decide how to represent some more of the data from the book. Here are some suggestions but you could choose your own data if you have a copy of the book.
Electricity:
76 have electricity. 24 do not.
In the village, the people with electricity have between them: 42 radios, 25televisions, 61 telephones and 15 computers.
Air and Water:
82 have access to a source of safe water either in their homes or within a short distance. 18 do not and must spend a large part of each day simply getting safe water. Most of the work of collecting water is done by women and girls.
64 have access to adequate sanitation - they have public or household sewage disposal - while 36 do not.
68 breathe clean air, while 32 breathe air that is unhealthy because of pollution.
You represent your own country in a similar way
You could use the village of 100 people idea, or perhaps "If my country was a class of thirty students"...Alternatively, if you want to work with worldwide statistics, you could come up with some extra pages for the original book.
Once you have researched statistics for your country how can you present them?
What about representing each person in the world as a single grain of rice, and then arranged them in heaps to help people compare different groups.
Can you come up with innovative ways of presenting the statistics you found for your country?
