Activity Description Students can create box plots which DO use the median in calculating the interquartile ranges for either built in or user-specified data as well as experiment with outliers. These graphs are also known as box-and-whisker plots.

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Box Plot

Place in mathematics curriculum:

This activity can be used to:

• systematically collect, organize, and describe data
• construct, read, and interpret tables, charts, and graphs
• practice calculating median
• explore outliers

This activity allows the user to view box plots for either built-in or user-specified data, and experiment with outliers. This activity would work well in groups of two to four for about twenty to twenty-five minutes if you use the exploration questions and ten to fifteen minutes otherwise.

Preparations for this activity:

• give implicit directions on what they are to do. For example "Today we are going to explore box plots. You are going to experiment with the box plot activity and see if you can answer the exploration questions..."
• answer the question "how does the computer figure out how to draw it?"
• discuss what outliers are, what they mean, and why are they important.