Educational content ideas/data sets

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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)
The value of PI to 10000 places
http://mondragon.angeltowns.net/paradiso/ValorDePi.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

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.