by Courtney Lousley

Room 12 students get creative during maths and statistics.

An opportunity presented and Room 12 took it. Pieere, (lead contractor for the new courts), was asked by Mr Lousley if R12 could enter the site he is digging posts for and do a statistical investigation on the objects were uncovered.

The posts have been dug for the new court area at Tahuna and Mr Scoles told us that there were some shells in the diggings. We thought it was a good idea to put into practise some of our data investigation skills and head out to do our maths class in the sun.

The class were in 3 groups and after they had a safety briefing and the cones were set up for a safety barrier, we began.

The area was previously on the edge of a freshwater lagoon and would have looked very different from back in the day. People could have used this area as a dump site for shells and or it may have been a midden that local Māori used.

There were heaps of shells and they were weighed and measured. "Some shells were still full and stuck together, which was really interesting" said Kahurangi. Old mate Harvey said "we had a shell that was like 45 grams which was really heavy compared to the others.

We searched for some time and even found some old bits of China plates as well.

It was fun as and a cool way to do some tally charts, weighing objects with scales and drawing up our findings in bar graphs.

We hope to get into the site again and do some more too!