Talk:Eventmath/Quantitative literacy course

To start a new discussion thread on this page, click on this button:

Add topic

Link to a separate page with a list of useful benchmark values?
Every student of quantitative literacy should probably learn the current global human population, say to the nearest billion. Must-know benchmarks like this help us check if claims are plausible, they help us to contextualize small and large numbers, and they help us to make useful estimates.

However, the list of values we ask students to learn must be reasonably short and cannot include all the values we find useful. If we have a dedicated page where we can put both must-know and nice-to-know benchmarks, then we could list the must-know values on the main course page, along with a link to the full list. The full list could also include links to lesson plans that make use of each benchmark (if available). This would have a variety of uses:
 * If a benchmark in the full list is used in a lot of lesson plans, that will suggest its inclusion in the must-know list.
 * Students might enjoy learning a few nice-to-know benchmarks related to their interests.
 * A more comprehensive list would give us a chance to learn from each other! Maybe there's a benchmark value I should know, but I don't realize it!
 * If we decide to reduce the must-know list, any benchmarks that get removed can still be recorded in the full list.

What do you all think? -- Greg at Higher Math Help (discuss • contribs) 07:54, 14 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Oh, and here's another benefit of creating a separate page for benchmark values: it will have its own Discuss tab. That might make it easier to have more detailed discussions about benchmarks. For example, here are a few more discussion questions:
 * The current list of benchmarks doesn't include any small numbers (i.e. positive numbers much less than one). How many of these would be helpful to include? We already have at least one Eventmath lesson plan that deals with small numbers, namely Comparing streaming service pay rates to artists. In that lesson plan, a nice approach is presented for dealing with these numbers: they're placed into a more familiar context by changing what's being measured (streams per dollar instead of dollars per stream). However, directly dealing with small numbers may sometimes be more favorable. For example, it's hard to appreciate a picture of a virus if you don't realize how truly tiny it is. Another example from biology is the width of a human hair, which may be helpful for understanding the size of a single bacterium.
 * The current list also leaves out various types of measurements. Which other types should we include, if any? To create an irreducible minimum of must-know benchmarks, we may want to limit ourselves to the SI base units for objects of scientific study, but there are seven of these. It might be helpful to at least add a few more base quantities to our list: time (e.g. the literal blink of an eye, Earth's age), mass/weight, and temperature. Since we live in the information age, we could also cover units of information, including file sizes and the meanings of common prefixes (e.g. mega, giga).
 * Wikipedia has some super helpful tables of benchmark values. Which of the benchmark values in these tables do you use on a regular basis? Here's a general list of measurements of different orders of magnitude, tables of lengths (from subatomic to astronomical), tables of data sizes, tables of masses, tables of times, tables of temperatures, and tables of probabilities of different orders of magnitude.
 * -- Greg at Higher Math Help (discuss • contribs) 05:41, 12 December 2022 (UTC)