Educational content ideas/data sets

For other ideas, see Educational content ideas

Interesting Data Sets

I know of Internet resources that present interesting data sets. But I don't undestand copyright laws enough to know if these sets can be incorporated into the OLPC project, so I'll just give examples of what I mean:

Positions of Stars in the sky

Contours of continents (GIS data)

Chemical Elements Tables

http://www.geocities.com/ajmas/docs/atomicelements

Data sets collected by Gleducar

http://wiki.gleducar.org.ar/wiki/Datos_como_materia_prima_de_aprendizaje

Data sets collected by Edusig (Python in Education)

http://wiki.python.org/moin/EduSig/DataResources

The value of PI to a millon places

http://neoparaiso.com/logo/valor-de-pi.html

Table of Prime factors

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_prime_factors

Common Names of People

http://wiki.gleducar.org.ar/wiki/Nombres_Propios_de_Personas

Spanish last names

http://wiki.gleducar.org.ar/wiki/Lista_de_Apellidos

Solar System Planet statistics

http://wiki.gleducar.org.ar/wiki/Datos_sobre_los_Planetas

Geopolitical Statistics

http://www.xist.org/default1.aspx

UNICEF Maps concerning children (spanish)

http://www.unicef.org/spanish/sowc05/maps.html

Dinosaurs Data files

http://internt.nhm.ac.uk/jdsml/nature-online/dino-directory/about-teachers.dsml (not open)

Nutritional Content of Different types of food

http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=8964

Roller Coaster Stats (to study energy conversion)

Species Evolution Trees

Species Statistics

estimated numbers of individuals, geographic location

The Powers of 10 tutorial

http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/

Natural Disasters Statistics

Type, How many people affected, Affected regions, Dates (is "disaster" the right word?)

Properties of Elements and Natural Substances

uses

Most often used words in a language

Words that rhyme

Collections of words with ortographic or phonetic properties

Timelines

technology advances, evolution, life forms, creation of continents, planetary formation, human evolution, philosophycal movements. Like: the Histomap of World History, Compact timeline of global history

Heights of Skyscrapers

http://www.skyscraperpage.com/ (might be insulting to poor countries)

Miscfiles

http://directory.fsf.org/GNU/miscfiles.html

(Or localized alternatives)

• connectives (prepositions, pronouns, and the like)
• web2- Webster's Second International English wordlist
• web2a- Webster's Second Internations appendix english wordlist
• propernames- some common proper names
• airport- list of three letter codes for some major airports
• birthtoken- traditional stone and flower for each month
• inter.phone- international country telephone codes
• cities.dat- geographic coordinates of many major cities
• postal.codes- postal codes for US and Mexican states and
• languages- two-letter codes for languages, from ISO 639
• currency- currency abbreviations and names
• countries- country abbreviations and names and capital cities
• jargon.html- The Jargon file (same as the _Hacker's_Dictionary_)
• us-constitution- The Constitution of the United States of America
• us-declaration- The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies

Project Gutenberg Data

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/8

Other Data Sets available

Many environmental agencies and monitoring groups are putting their data online. This could be particularly important for students in developing nations, where poverty is often coupled with environmental problems. Older students can use this data to learn about the environment and even write their own scientific papers. One example of this kind of database can be found here: http://sev.lternet.edu/projects.php?meid=15, although there are many others. Their numbers continue to grow, especially since NSF encourages data sharing: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/gpg/broaderimpacts.pdf.

Collaborative Projects to Join

Science and Math Projects from CIESE

http://www.k12science.org/collabprojs.html

Collaborative and real time data projects for K-12 science and math education. Includes the following projects for Spring and Fall:

• Down the Drain: How Much Water Do You Use?
• The International Boiling Point Project
• Human Genetics: A Worldwide Search for the Dominant Trait
• The Global Water Sampling Project
• The Global Sun/Temperature Project
• Square of Life: Studies in Local and Global Environments
• Bucket Buddies
• Take a Dip
• Mission to Eros: Rendezvous with an Asteroid
• Noonday Project: Measuring the Circumference of the Earth

General

Central Intelligence Agency

http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html

The World Fact Book 2002. Collect and analyze data about different counteries.

U.S. Census Bureau

http://www.census.gov/

Excel files throughout the site depending on the topic you are looking for.

Federal Reserve, Economic Data

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred/

FedStats

http://www.fedstats.gov/

The gateway to statistics from over 100 U.S. Federal agencies

StatLib

Datasets Archive:http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/datasets/

From the Carnegie Mellon University Statistics Department. Datasets from articles and books, and other sets submitted by readers.