Exploring HIV Stats

Students in years 10 and 11 have marked World Aids day (Dec 1st) by learning about some of the stories that are told through statistics on HIV and AIDS. The idea was to give students a sense of what the numbers mean and the impact that HIV has had on different parts of the world. The idea is a cross curricular project between PSCHE/homeroom and Mathematics and some resources are available here - HIV - AIDS Statistics.

In an assembly, students were asked to put them selves in to different groups that eventually represented the ratio of those with and those without HIV in different countries. They were watching themselves do this live as a camera image was projected so that they could decide how they looked before photos were taken. The idea was to work on visual representations of some of these statistics. They were eventually asked to think about their own visual representations of these numbers and to be inspired by other infographics about HIV like these examples. Hopefully we will soon be able to post some of the examples students came up with here.

After that students were asked to solve a puzzle involving bits of information and some graphs about 8 different countries. the aim is to put the right piece of information with the right country.

The puzzle is here and involves looking at graphs like the one below where you can see what has happened to life expectancy in this particular country over the last 60 years. Which country do you think it is?

Here are some photos from the activity in action! This is the students moving themselves in to different groups to represent the proportion of people with HIV in different countries. As you can see, some of the groups have as many as 1 in 4 people standing up.