Activity Overview
Which statistics really count towards a football team's success? Football commentators often refer to the over use of handballs. Is there any correlation between a team's success and the frequency that players use handball to maintain possession or move the ball forward? This activity comes pre-loaded with all the relevant statistics from the 2016 AFL home and away season so that students can focus on searching and exploring for correlations rather than data entry. See which statistics really count.
Objectives
Students are able to explore and investigate correlation strength: Strong / Moderate / Weak, nature: Positive / Negative and form: Linear / non-Linear visually and later, quantitatively using Pearson's Correlation Coefficient. Students are also instructed to combine collections of statistics with a view to identifying stronger correlations. To illustrate their understanding, students are posed a challenging problem to place an imaginary team into the appropriate ladder position, based on a selection of statistics. Students need to consider the strength of the previously computed correlation for each of the provided statistics and how helpful that might be in predicting the team's ladder position.
Vocabulary
Correlation:
- Strong / Moderate / Weak
- Positive / Negative
- Linear / non-Linear
Pearson's Correlation Coefficient
About the Lesson
Winning Strategies is about finding the strongest correlations between a large range of statistics available on the TI-Nspire file. The Data and Statistics Application in TI-Nspire allows for rapid changing of data allows students to visually inspect correlation and determine its nature. Students are also required to logically combine sets of data and investigate correlation strength and make predications based on correlation. The activity does require a basic level of understanding of an AFL football match.
Data is from the 2016 AFL home and away season.