In a Heartbeat Activity - Lesson Plan

The lesson plan incorporats an activity that  uses fitness as an example to make a scatterplot.  The lesson plan incorporates using a fitness instructor as a speaker to explain the relationship between working out and the heartrate.  The students will then participate in an activity that will require them to plot a scatterplot and then try to find the line of best fit.  It has discussion questions as well as extension and connections. This lesson plan is very detailed. It will have the student plot their heartrate before and after a fitness activity. The students will have to determine the correlation between beginning heartrate and ending heartrate. They will try to find the line of best fit of the class as well. It requires that the students be active learners. The discussion questions can be linked to a journaling activity.

Standards & Objectives

Learning objectives: 

Objective:

Students will apply their knowledge of scatter plots to discover the correlation between heartbeats per minute before and after aerobic exercise.

Lesson Variations

Blooms taxonomy level: 
Applying
Extension suggestions: 

Extensions & Connections:

  • How would the graph look if the bpm before exercising were plotted on the x-axis, and the bpm after exercising were plotted on the y-axis.?
  • Have students predict the correlation between two related sets of data. Then have them collect a reasonable sample, plot the points and analyze to ascertain the relationship. For example, What is the correlation between a person’s shoe size and his ring size?
  • Provide a variety of examples from which students have to explain what the data tells them. This may mean providing ordered pairs which have to be plotted, or it could include graphs of “best fit lines” with various arrangements of clusters.

 

Helpful Hints

Materials:

Each Group

  • Sheet of graph paper
  • colored pencil
  • colored dot sticker (one per student)
  • piece of uncooked vermicelli spaghetti
  • one ruler

Per Class

  • Guest speaker (Aerobic Instructor)
  • Poster graph
  • Stopwatch 
  • Musci

References

Contributors: