These Days Are Numbered: Eight Summer Math Ideas

The school year is starting to wind down in many places in the country, and it brings worries about so-called summer slide – the documented decline in student skills during the long summer break.

Whether school is ending soon for you or whether you’re looking a little further into the future for ways to keep students’ minds engaged and occupied over break, here are eight ways for students to use New York Times reporting to think about math over the summer.

1. Go for the Gold

The 2012 summer Olympic Games are fast approaching. Who will top the medal count in London? Check out the medal count from the 2008 Beijing Games, and explore the final standings from the games from 1896 to 2008 using the interactive “Map of Olympic Medals.” Choose your favorite countries and make a graph of their medal counts for past Olympics. How do you think they will fare this summer in London? Will the host country enjoy a “home-field advantage”? Check the medal counts of previous hosts to see.

Will world records continue to fall? Check out the evolution of world record times for events like the 100-meter dash and 200-meter freestyle. Read about how advances in science help swimmers swim faster, and make some informed projections about how athletes will perform this year.

And the Olympics aren’t just about sports. When it comes to the economics of the Olympics, are host cities winners or losers? Are the games more trouble than they’re worth? By what measure?

2. Watch Those Stocks

How do seasonal changes affect businesses’ bottom lines? What kinds of companies perform better in the summer? Worse? Do restaurants and hotel chains post better financial numbers in the summer? Research and follow companies like Darden Restaurants and Choice Hotels International to see whether and how their performance changes in the summer months. Do companies like the Gap and Staples pick up steam as students start to head back to school?

Or, identify specific companies of your choice based on your own criteria, and track their stock prices. How does the market overall perform over the summer? Track composite indices like Dow Jones Industrial Average and compare its performance with historical data from summers and winters past; does the market change at similar rates throughout the year?

3. Get Out of Town

If you can’t get out of the house this summer for a trip, research and plan a future vacation. What’s your dream trip? Check out the Travel section, set up a budget and see how far you can go.

For example, if you have always wanted to see Beijing, check out hotel and restaurant prices using The Times’s travel guides. Be sure to check if summer is a good time to travel to China, and don’t forget to price your flights.

Challenge yourself by reducing your budget and see what kind of trip you can come up with on the cheap. Get ideas from the Frugal Traveler and look for creative ways to travel on a shoestring, like volunteering.

And be sure to check out this article on the perfect time to buy a plane ticket. (Simply booking as far ahead as possible doesn’t do the trick.) After reading the article, try out your own experiment by choosing some future flights and checking the fares every day; plot the fares on a graph, and see when the minimum price occurs. Does it match the advice in the article?

4. The Race for the Pennant …

The boys of summer are back! Follow the performance of your favorite baseball teams and players using the Baseball section and the Major League Baseball statistics page. Will the Yankees win 100 games this year? Will Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder live up the expectations of their $200 million contracts? Keep up with in-season storylines at the Bats blog. Make your predictions and projections, and see how yours compare with those of this professor who uses mathematical modeling to predict the final standings.

And for an interesting application of geometry to baseball, consider the new dimensions of Citi Field, the home stadium for the New York Mets. Only 108 home runs were hit at Citi Field last year. Now that the fences have been moved in, how many home runs will be hit there this year?

5. … And the White House

While the rest of the country is thinking about summer vacation, the presidential candidates are just getting warmed up. Stay on top of the race for the White House on the Politics page or with the Election 2012 mobile app. Track the candidates’ progress with the latest polls and election infographics.

Who’s got the best chance of winning the election? Which way will the swing states fall? And which candidate is winning the donations race? Find more ideas here in our lesson “The United States of Numeracy: The Math of a Presidential Campaign.”

Stay current with Nate Silver’s quantitative election coverage on the FiveThirtyEight blog, where you can post comments about the analysis. And check out our other election-related resources, like our collection of teaching ideas and resources for the 2012 election.

6. Parse Personal Data

Got some spare time on your hands now that school is out? Why not take a closer look at how your habits and routines change, or stay the same, during the summer. First, read about what the Wolfram Alpha creator Stephen Wolfram learned about himself by analyzing 23 years of e-mails. Then conduct your own personal data collection experiment.

Choose some quantities to record like the time you wake up or go to sleep, how much time you spend with digital media, how many text messages or e-mails you send and receive, how you spend time on Facebook or other interesting quantities.

Collect the data and then analyze and represent the results, maybe by making your own infographic. Are your sleep patterns more or less consistent in the summer? Do you spend more or less time on the Web? Find a way to tell your story with your personal data.

Acquaint yourself with how companies like Target and Facebook are using the data they collect about you and what students think about it. How much do you think your personal data is worth? How much is it worth to specific companies like Facebook?

7. Track Weather Patterns

Does this summer seem warmer than the last? Do you think climate change is affecting summer highs and lows? Do you believe recent weather events are connected to global warming? How can you tell?

Get up to speed on the latest news and views about global warming and track the temperatures all summer long. Research historical weather data and compare with current trends. Use tools like WeatherSpark to create graphs of weather data and ForecastAdvisor to compare different weather projections.

8. Chart Summer Blockbusters

Keep an eye on how Hollywood movies fare over the summer. Will “The Avengers” win the title of biggest summer blockbuster? Will box-office numbers continue to decline? Check the weekly box-office numbers and track how your favorite films, and the industry overall, are doing. Drill down deeper into the data at sites like BoxOfficeMojo to compare current and past box office performance.