Tabletop

Tabletop Junior:

How might Tabletop Junior be used in connection with things you do or would like to do in your classroom with your students?

I would like to use this software in conjunction with sorting math manipulatives with our younger elementary students. As they learn grouping with physical objects, using this software to sort larger groups of objects would help them begin to think abstractly about characteristics of objects.

I also like the way this software allows manipulations of Venn diagrams. For younger students, figuring out how Venn diagrams work can be challenging and I think experimenting with this software would help teach that concept. Students can change the rule for a loop and immediately see what changes occur in the diagram. Working with manipulatives alone, they would need adult feedback on whether they had interpreted the rule correctly, as well as needing much more time to physically rearrange objects, both of which might discourage experimentation.

Tabletop:
Your job is to come up with:
• a question
• two interesting relationships
• some thoughts or explanations for the relationships.

Looking at this database, I first thought of some of the questions I would like to have students answer in the watershed unit. In the watershed unit, we are looking at both causes and effects of water pollution. I thought the x-y graphs that can be created with the database would give students an opportunity to hypothesize about some of these causes and effects.

Given that, my question to students would be ‘What can you hypothesize about causes and effects of polluted water from this data?’

I found two interesting relationships as I looked at this question, both in x-y plot format:
• Safe water(rural) versus infant mortality.
• Safe water(rural) versus GDP agriculture.

If the relationship in the first plot is causal, it could imply that unsafe water is causing infant deaths in these countries. There is not much evidence in the database, however, that this is a causal relationship. The interesting part of this graph is the cluster of countries with 100% safe water. These countries have some of the lowest infant mortality rates of all countries plotted.

The second plot may show the relationship between a heavily agricultural society and pollution. Many students do not realize that farming causes just as much (or more) pollution than industry, especially in groundwater. The relationship in this plot would lead me to hypothesize that countries that are very dependant on agriculture for their GNP are more likely to have water supplies contaminated by fertilizers and other agricultural byproducts.