ID107: Stacked Bars – Music Genres

Homework the previous night was to record the genre of the next 25 songs they listened to. I showed ’em how to sort their songs by “Last Played” in iTunes.

They came back the next day and I had them tally up their genres, again, building stacked bars of their music preferences. Everyone used the same color/genre legends and we posted a long strip of music preferences on the back wall.

For reasons I can’t quite recall, I had them come up to my laptop at the front and punch their preferences into a GoogleDocs spreadsheet also. Makes me sound like some School 2.0 badass but I didn’t do anything with it that I can remember.

I did beat it into them over and over again how cool it was we could draw conclusions about our class’ preferences at a quick glance.

Music Analysis Homework
“Music We Like” Wall Poster

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I'm Dan and this is my blog. I'm a former high school math teacher and current head of teaching at Desmos. He / him. More here.

4 Comments

  1. Thanks for giving me some great *real world* ideas to use when I do my own pre-algebra data analysis unit in the spring (also our 6th grade has a unit on data analysis too).

    Sad to not see any classic rock anywhere in that there color legend! Kids these days…………. ;-)

    (p.s. your PDF links aren’t working at the moment)

  2. Are they going by the genre encoded in the song’s ID3 tag, and displayed by iTunes? Or do you have class-wide criteria for differentiating between “rap” and “hip hop”?

  3. Got that fixed now, Rich.

    Ben, mostly they just guessed at it. Some used the tags on their iPod or iTunes but most didn’t.

  4. when I do my own pre-algebra data analysis unit in the spring (also our 6th grade has a unit them over and over again how cool it was we could draw conclusions about our class’