Week 6 :: Spreadsheets and the Computer Dreaming Pie Chart

v Objectives

Students will be able to do simple calculations with a spreadsheet and create a chart from a series of numeric-value cells.

v Standards

Students will replicate teacher-modeled spreadsheets and finally create their own spreadsheet to organize data from the Computer Dreaming slide.

v Anticipatory Set

“Everybody pull out paper and pencil and compute the GPA of a student with 2 A’s, 2 B’s, and 3 C’s. As you know, at our school an A is 4 points, a B is 3 points, a C is 2 points, and so on. Do the math. Anybody have a calculator? What is the GPA? What if I gave you 5 students’ grades—could you do it? What if I gave you 500 students’ grades—could you do it? . . . Allow me to introduce you to the spreadsheet."

v Teaching

a. Input

Teacher presents rows and columns and cells, numeric value versus label, auto-fit, format bar, extrapolating pie charts, and making formulas.

b. Modeling

Students recreate on their computers what the teacher models:

1. GPA for 10 students, then change the value of grade levels

2. Total cost of a shopping trip, where items are bought in multiples

3. How many seconds in 3.56 years?

c. Check For Understanding

Many students ignore the formula and simply enter the correct value for the total, but this is easily monitored by announcing a sudden change in one of the values and seeing if the spreadsheet updates itself.

v Guided Practice/Monitoring

Students make a shopping list of their own and extrapolate a pie chart.

v Closure

“What kind of jobs require you to keep data in a big chart?”

v Independent Practice

Computer Dreaming Pie Chart: Take the data from the Computer Dreaming 2000 slide, plug it into an Excel spreadsheet, convert data into a chart or graph, and bring it all back to the Spreadsheet slide.