Some Results from SportAtSchool Pilot in July 2011


Seven UK schools took part in the SportAtSchool Pilot in July 2011, two primary and five secondary schools totalling 102 and 164 responses respectively.  Figure 1 shows the gender split for primary and secondary learners.

The results below are from these 266 school-aged learners and do not represent all UK school-aged learners.   These are published as a starting point for discussion and further investigation.

Compare your class to these results.  Get your class's data by taking part in the SportAtSchool online questionnaire.

Some questions included:

 

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Where did you keep your mobile phone last night when you were asleep?


Figure 2 shows that 62 % of children, from the SportAtSchool pilot, kept their mobile phone in their bedrooms when they were asleep the night before they answered this question, and 17 % kept it under their pillow.

 

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It seems, from Figure 3, that older children are more likely to keep their mobile phone in their bedrooms.

 

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Name a famous Olympian


The CensusAtSchool online questionnaire in 2008/2009 asked children to name a famous Olympian.  Approximately 14,000 children answered this question with some interesting results and unusual spellings.  The cleaned results are shown in Figure 4 with Kelly Holmes being named the most often.  It was clear that the learners knew many Olympians but they often could not spell their names properly or could not remember their exact names. Also, a large number submitted names that were deliberately wrong but some contained sufficient information to show they were ‘close’ to a famous Olympian. Thus the data needed to be cleaned before they could be processed in order to draw conclusions.  Guess the Olympian is a teaching resource based on cleaning, displaying and interpreting random samples from this data.

 

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From this small pilot, and from comparing Figures 4 and 5, it looks as though Usain Bolt is becoming more famous than Kelly Holmes and some new Olympians are becoming well-known.

 

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Click here to see our Guess the Olympian resource

Can you swim 25 metres?

Can you ride a bike?


One in five children of the children in this pilot cannot swim or have never tried (Figure 6)

95 % of the children in this pilot can ride a bike.

 

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Are you going to an event at the Summer Olympic Games?


The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games are less than a year away.  Of the 222 children who answered this question 25 stated that they are going to an event at the London 2012 Olympic Games. Only one boy said he was going to the Paralympics.  See the SportAtSchool Olympic Quiz.

 

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Will you go to see the Torch Relay?


On 19 May 2012 the Olympic torch starts its 70-day relay from Land’s End, traverses the UK and on 26 July 2012 ends up at Westminster in London, just before the opening ceremony at the Olympic stadium on 27 July.

The SportAtSchool Torch Relay dynamic map interaction resource investigates the relationship between the as-the-crow-flies and overland distances between two points on a map.  This investigation gives learners the opportunity to:

  • discover relationships between variables;
  • plot scatter graphs;
  • draw lines of best fit;
  • construction and interpret box plots;
  • construct and interpret histograms;
  • make predictions;
  • discuss results;
  • draw conclusions.

 

Try the Torch Relay tool here!

12 % of children who took part in the SportAtSchool pilot said they were going to see the Torch Relay.  10 % did not know what this is.  The question has been amended to give an extra response option, 'don't know'.

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