Source: Asbury Park Press

Aside from the physical drama and the halftime theatrics, the Super Bowl provides prime fodder for data analytics. The enormous volume of communication and marketing around this shared cultural moment offers a case study for exploring numbers and significance.

These days, graphs are no longer the sole purview of math class. This fall, for example, we spent a “math week” in social studies talking about how historians incorporate statistics and charts in probing the details behind pivotal events. Similarly, the Super Bowl bridges academic disciplines as an appealing touchstone for students to get excited about analytical reasoning and data design. That’s how right-brained and left-brained mindsets can merge perfectly in a contemporary STEAM study.

Some examples of lessons and visual aids that use graphs and charts include:

• Is There A Visual Thinking App? Charts, Graphs, & The 1:1 Classroom
• The School Of Big Data – Choosing The Right Graph
• I Love Charts – Discovering Stories Hidden In Numbers
• A Taxonomy Of Graphs

Source: Yellowfin

On Super Bowl Sunday, 1.25 billion chicken wings are expected to be consumed. The number of tweets is predicted to top 25 million, up significantly from the 13.4 million last year. And the average American is projected to consume 2,400 calories of Super Bowl chow.

The emphasis here is on the visual presentation of numerical sets. Graphic literacy (or “graphicacy”) means that learners can “read” the grammar of lines and bars. Understanding trends and anomalies are key skills in interpreting mathematical and scientific figures.

As every educational institution searches for ways to blend STEAM proficiencies into the curriculum, the pop draw of the Super Bowl can be just the ticket to grab kids’ attentions in discovering the day’s dynamic details. Any of the tables or diagrams below would be terrific examples to show on Monday in kicking off a week of visual STEAM activities. The logical reasoning of numbers meets the illustrative narrative of the liberal arts:

Source: The New York Times

Super Bowl ads often get the most attention from both football diehards and passing revelers alike. This interactive tool from the New York Times allows students to compare a timeline of percentages as they parse the media blitz across the years.

Source: Yellowfin

The media literacy component of Super Bowl mayhem cannot be overlooked. Many avenues exist for teachers to guide students in realizing the emotional tug of advertising during this high profile event. Yellowfin has designed an easily understood graph of Super Bowl ad prices to engage any student.

Source: Yellowfin

For aficionados of the sport itself, Yellowfin has assembled a horizontal bar chart of MVP winners by position. The results are familiar enough to let the content drive the comprehension. In other words, even the youngest mathematicians can expect QBs to win awards, and thus the extended blue bar becomes a visual signifier for their predictions. 

Source: Yellowfin

For strategists of team offenses, bubble graphs can blend with traditional tables to illuminate the choices of quarterbacks in certain situations.

For other Super Bowl educational resources, we recommend these posts:

• Teaching The Super Bowl: Social Media Literacy
• The Other Super Bowl Commercials And The Power Of Student Voice

Infographics are a great source of information and make reading information from the computer screen much easier, but just showing students an infographic and telling them to study it isn’t the most effective way to exploit the medium.

Creating your own infographic tasks can be time consuming though, so in this posting I’m presenting a number of generic ideas that should work with a number of types of infographic. You can use these ideas with students to help focus their comprehension of the information and give them clear goals for engaging with the information in the graphics.

Peer created questions
Give your students an infographic and get them to create a quiz based around it. Once the students have created their quiz they can use it to check the comprehension or knowledge of other students in their class. You can make this competitive and have teams to quiz each other. You could also have different infographics for each group and they can exchange questions and infographics.

• This activity has a duel role in that students need to read through the infographic and understand it in order to create the questions, but they also practise formulating questions. The activity also adds an element of competition which some students find motivating and of course it saves you a lot of time creating questions yourself.

Fact finding
Ask your students to find x-number of what they believe are the most important or significant facts in the infographic. Get them to justify their choice and explain why these points are the most significant.

• This activity encourages students to evaluate and make value judgements about the information they are being exposed to. It also reveals elements of their own value system and exposes them for discussion which can be very enlightening.

Checking sources / corroborating information
Get students to check the sources of any statistics mentioned in an infographic to make sure they are correct and that the sources are valid. You could also get them to find supporting sources on other sites that either authenticate or contradict the statistics stated in the infographic.

• There’s a common joke that 83% of all statistics are made up. Often students tend to believe any information that they find online. This activity encourages students to be more critical and to check the validity of information they find. It also helps them to develop the necessary research skills to validate online information.

Comparing to yourself
You can get students to find out where they fit within any infographics that contain personal information. You can also use this as a mingle task by asking students to try to find someone in the classroom who fits into any of the same statistics that they do.

• This encourages the students to apply the information to themselves and by personalising it can make it seem more real, memorable and tangible. This can make data a little less dehumanising. The mingle activity can also help to improve classroom dynamics and help students to get to know each other.

Checking bias and motivation
Ask the students to find out who created the infographic and why they think it was created. This involves them researching the source and thinking about the relationship between the company that created the graphic and the information in it.

• This encourages students to think more deeply about information and to question the goals and motivation behind it. Students often think of information as neutral, but the way information is displayed and what information is chosen can influence readers. Pushing students to look more deeply at the motivations behind the information can make them more critical readers.

Personal response
You can ask students for a range of personal responses to any infographic. Here are some possible example questions.
What did you find interesting?
What information do you doubt?
What information would you like to share? Who with? Why?

• This encourages students to think about applying information and making it purposeful for their own lives. Encouraging a personal response from students can also make the lessons more meaningful and memorable for them.

Summary / Writing
Ask your students to take notes about the most important information in the infographic and then use the notes to write a summary. The summary could have some form of publication as a motivation, such as a newspaper report website publication. Once they have finished a first draft they can exchange with another student and compare to see if they chose the same main points. You could also ask them to peer edit the text and then return it before writing a final draft.

• This can help to develop students process writing skills and academic study skills. It encourages students to evaluate information and make and articulate the connections between different nuggets of information.

Presentation summary
You can ask your students to prepare an oral presentation based on the information they took from the infographic. They can also prepare a presentation deck with images and text to help support their presentation.

• This can help to develop students speaking and presentation skills. The ability to present and talk about information is also a valuable workplace skill.

Create your own research
Get students to create their own research questionnaire based around the same topic. They can use this either in class or share it through social media and collect the information for their own infographic.

• This develops students research skills and encourages them to think about the framing of questions to extract information. It also encourages them to think about how they present data once it has been collected.

 I hope you find these tasks useful. You can find more tasks, examples and ideas for using and creating infographics in my ebook – Exploiting Infographics for Digital Literacy and Critical Thinking

Related links:

• My infographic lesson plans
• Creating illustrations and infographics for ELT tasks
• Exploiting Infographics for ELT
• Digital Video – A manual for language teachers
• Managing the digital classroom – Using a backchannel
• Managing the digital classroom – Getting students\’ attention
• 20 + Things you can do with QR codes in your school
• Brainstorming and polling with AnswerGarden

Best