Using the Guardian Data Store for teaching statistics

There are many sites on the internet with data that can be used for teaching statistics but one of the best, and most topical is the Guardian Data Store.  The Guardian Data Store can be found at http://www.guardian.co.uk/data

Raw data on many topical news stories

The data store contains the data associated with stories that are in the news including such varied items as the riots and deprivation, the attendance of MPs and the full data on all the Doctor Who villains.  For many of the items there is a Google Docs spreadsheet of the raw data to download.


Importing the data into software

Whilst it is possible to analyse that data within a Google Docs spreadsheet you can do a lot more by importing it into a statistics package.  Two of the easiest to use are TI-Nspire and Autograph.  With both of these it is very quick to just to copy the data in the spreadsheet and paste it into a list.  All the analysis and the diagrams built-in to these packages can then be applied to the data.


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