Solar Storms and You!

Activity 15 : Pie Charts in Science

Introduction

As part of the IMAGE satellite program, there has been a web site created for teachers and students called POETRY. One of the links is titled 'Ask the Space Scientist'. From this link students may ask a scientist questions about space and read the posted answers. There are several topic areas that now have questions that you may read answers to, and this exercise lets you study the relative percentages of the questions in each topic area to see which topics are the most popular.

Objective

By completing the data table, students should be able to construct and interpret a graph which includes data from the table.

Materials

Calculator
Protractor

Procedure

  1. Students should finish the table by filling in the blank central angle column.
  2. Students should create a circle graph to represent the topic request percentages.
  3. Students should answer the accompanying questions based on the information in the pie chart. NOTE: When students have completed the activity, they may want to visit the POETRY web site at http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry and have a look at some of the questions and answers that they find at 'Ask the Space Scientist".

Key Terminology

FAQ: An internet term that refers to 'Frequently Asked Questions'.
Hits: An internet term that refers to the number of times a particular web page is requested by a visitor.

Conclusions

Scientists use many different type of graphing techniques to that they can better visualize the relationships within the data. Pie charts, bar graphs, surface plotting are all examples of these tools. Can you find other examples in your local newspaper?

Related Web Resources

Visit the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Web Server Weekly Summaries archive for more data that you can plot.

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This activity was developed by the NASA, IMAGE/POETRY 
Teacher and Student Consortium. 
For more information, and a list of other resources, visit 
the IMAGE/POETRYweb site.