Activity Overview
Students will enter data into a TI-Nspire spreadsheet for the Olympic men's 100m free-style swimming event. Once entered, they will graph the data and find the correlation coefficient, coefficient of determination and the equation of the line of best fit. They will use that equation to make predictions.
An extension is provided to graph the residuals and least-squares to determine a line of best fit.
Before the Activity
Download the TNS file and make it available to students. You may also want to make copies of the handout provided.
During the Activity
See the directions in the attached handout.
After the Activity
In this extension, students will attempt to fit a movable line to the data, do a residual plot and plot the sum of squares--noticing how the sum changes as they move the line. Finally they will find the line of best fit and compare its sum of squares to their movable line sum.