Would Yorkshire *really* be that far up the medal table?

Yesterday morning I was looking at the medal table and wondering whether there was a ‘fairer’ way that it might be arranged, what with various discussions around who was the greatest Olympian and what the criteria ought to be. And then I thought that this might be an interesting investigation for our students. The base data is available in the medal table, then it would be up to them to find the supplementary data to support their argument.

Maybe each medal ought to have a value, then create a spreadsheet to calculate the ‘new’ results – would it change the order? How? So this might suit an ICT and/or Maths lesson at different levels with the spreadsheet including different elements of sophistication: multiplication or addition formulae, absolute and relative references, modelling through attempting different possible values for each medal and exploring the outcomes, graphing the results.

Although an initial thought came from looking at those nations above us and wondering whether their pool of talent was greater than ours, it follows naturally that there will be smaller nations than GB, so perhaps ‘medals per head of capita’ would be a fairer system. Here then students would need to find a source of population data, then process it to create a new medal table – Geography, Maths and ICT.

I also never fail to be moved when athletes from nations with far fewer resources at their disposal succeed. Could medals be organised according to GDP or some other metric perhaps? Again where might students find that data, how would they apply it and what effect would it have on the standings? So this time we might be adding Economics to the previous mix of subjects.

As ‘Super Saturday’ drew to a close, TeamGB’s place in the medal table had improved considerably and generated a few Tweets which offered even further lines of enquiry. Some people claimed that GB would top the table if it was medals per head of capita, but I could only wonder about the nations below GB in the table – had those people considered nations further down the table? Someone else suggested that if Yorkshire was a nation, it would be 11th in the medal table (7th by the end of Saturday!). Finding the data to back up, or refute that claim might introduce a higher level of demand from the search? Perhaps also a Tweet might be a great place to start the discussion, thereby bringing in the notion of ‘truth’ in claims made through social media and offering opportunities for broadening the discussion still further.

Whilst the medal table does indeed give a quick view of the results, might there be other more effective ways of displaying the new data arising from student investigations? An opportunity perhaps to bring in Design or Art by creating an infographic to display their findings?

Data processing needn’t be dry at all and the Olympics medal table could offer a topical and authentic cross-curricular opportunity.