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Classroom-Ready Data Sets in Environmental Math - Concluding Remarks

Author(s): 
Greg Langkamp and Joe Hull

We believe that our web-based collection of data sets gives educators a valuable classroom resource for developing and teaching courses that involve data investigation and analysis, whether in an interdisciplinary setting or not. Verbal and written feedback from educators supports this -- many use the data sets for class examples, homework, and projects, in manners similar to our own. One user recently wrote, "I’m glad I found [your site]. Good data are hard to find." Numerical evidence in the form of visitor hits also tells us that the web site is serving the educational community: Site hits from high schools and colleges (presumably students and teachers) currently number about 100 per week and are steadily growing.

Although our NSF funding has ended, we will continue to develop environmental mathematics materials for QELP. We're working on a preliminary draft of a liberal arts mathematics text with an environmental theme, which will include many exercises similar to the hazardous waste project on the preceding page. See the New Book page at our web site for more information. We'll also be posting additional data sets to the QELP collection. Our goal is complete coverage of the mathematics and environmental science topics that we list. To this end, if you have appropriate environmental data sets to share, please contact us! We'll be glad to format the files and get them posted.

Greg Langkamp and Joe Hull, "Classroom-Ready Data Sets in Environmental Math - Concluding Remarks," Convergence (December 2004)