Constructing a Frequency Distribution Graph

Subjects:

Mathematics and all other subjects

Type of Exercise:

The exercise is suitable to be used

• in class to be solved by each student individually
• in class to be solved in small groups of 2-3 students
• as homework

Objectives:

• analysing data
• practising analytical skills
• construction of a frequency distribution graph
• basic operations with Excel (if you do not want to use Excel the students can be asked to draw the graph)

Prerequisite:

• Chapter 2.1: The Frequency Distribution
• The students should be familiar with the following terms: discrete data, continous data, frequency distribution
• If the students are already familiar with Excel, they should be fine. Additional help with importing data from text files is given in Material 2
• If the students are not familiar with Excel 97, a short introduction will be needed (Material 3).

Materials:

1. Textfile with data: datafile_dice.txt (essential)
2. Tutorial How to import text files into Excel (optional)
3. Tutorial How to draw a histogram in Excel (optional)

Time needed:

1-2 school lessons, depending on the students' previous knowledge in working with Excel

Solution:

The data ranges from 1 to 6, this determines the number of columns on the x-axis.
The distribution of the data is as follows.

Event	Count
1	5
2	3
3	10
4	4
5	4
6	4
Total	30

The largest count of events is 10. The range of the Y-axis is therefore from 1 to 10.
This is what the histogram showing the frequency distribution of events should look like.