ICT at key stage 3    (Year 7)

• Explain to the pupils that they are going to do some research to support a lottery bid for funding a new leisure/sports amenity in their local area. The objective will be to present their findings in a report, ensuring that the bidding is appropriate to the needs and wishes of the local community. This will involve finding out information, eg what facilities the local people would like in such an amenity.
• Reinforce concepts of fields, records and data types and demonstrate a prepared database to revise these.
• Introduce a topic and discuss the information the class would like to be able to find from a database, eg gender, age, sporting and hobby activities, wish list of activities, opening hours.
• Discuss a couple of questionnaires to evaluate, eg question types, layout, field types.

• Ask the class to discuss, in groups, what data they are going to collect in order to produce a report informing the bidders about the most appropriate facilities. They should form a hypothesis at this point related to their own opinions, eg expecting swimming to be the most popular choice or girls to dislike football. Explain to the pupils how to ask questions to gain clarification and further information. They need to agree as a class what data to collect and its format. Ask the pupils to construct questionnaires to collect data. Ask them to construct the database to enable data entry of the collected data. Ensure pupils understand the sorts of questions they need to ask from the data before the structure is finalised.

• Ask pupils to enter data into the database from the completed questionnaires. During this process explain to pupils how to verify the accuracy of the data and how to use techniques offered by the software to alert operators to incorrect entry.

• Show pupils how to add an extra field to the database that was not considered earlier but would provide useful information, eg opinions on local facilities already provided. Discuss why this late addition would prove costly to research and add at this stage.
• Revise searching and graphing using the merged database, ensuring that pupils are saving the results that they need for their report. This activity should be related to the hypotheses formed earlier.

• Discuss with pupils the audience for the report and the conclusions that might be drawn from the research. Ask pupils to produce individual reports. Ensure pupils present the data in forms that show the information needed, appropriately combining numerical, graphical and text information. Discuss appropriate software.