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://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.