In April 2017, I presented an ASA K-12 statistics education webinar: Statistical reasoning with data cards (webinar). Towards the end of the webinar, I encouraged teachers to get students to make their own data cards about their cats. A few days later, I then thought that this could be something to get NZ teachers and students involved with. Imagine a huge collection of real data cards about dogs and cats? Real data that comes from NZ teachers and students? Like Census At School but for pets 🙂 I persuaded a few of my teacher friends to create data cards for their pets (dogs or cats) and to get their students involved, to see whether this project could work. Below is a small selection of the data cards that were initially created (beware of potential cuteness overload!)

The project then expanded to include more teachers and students across NZ, and even the US, and I’ve now decided to keep the data card generator (and collection) page open so that the set of data cards can grow over time. Please use the steps below to get students creating and sharing data cards about their pets.

Creating and sharing data cards about dogs and cats

Inevitably, there will be submissions made that are “fake”, silly or offensive (see below).

Data cards submitted to the project won’t automatically be added to any public sets of data cards, and will be checked first. Just like with any surveying process that is based on self-selection, is internet based and relies on humans to give honest and accurate answers, there is the potential for non-sampling errors. To help reduce the quantify of “fake” data cards, if you are keen to have your students involved with this project it would be great if you could do the following:

1. Talk to your students about the project and explain that the data cards will be shared with other students. They will be sharing information about their pet and need to be OK with this (and don’t have to!). The data will be displayed with a picture of their pet, so participation is not strictly anonymous. All of this is important to discuss with students as we need to educate students about data privacy 🙂

2. When students submit their data, they are given the finished data card which they can save. Set up a system where students need to share the data card they have created with you e.g. by saving into a shared Google drive or Dropbox, or by emailing the data card to you. The advantage for you of setting up this system is that you get your class/school set of data cards to use however you want. The advantage for me is that this level of “watching” might discourage silly data cards being created.

3. Share this link with your students http://learning.statistics-is-awesome.org/dogsvscats/ and let the rain of cats and dogs begin!

Pet data cards

The data collection period for this set of data cards was 1 May 17 to 19 May 17.

The diagram below shows the data included on each data card:


Additional data that could be used from each data card includes:

  • Whether the pet photo was taken inside or outside
  • Whether the pet photo is rotated (and the angle of rotation)
  • The number of letters in the pet name
  • The number of syllables in the pet name

PDF of all data cards: click to download