Implementation
Discovering Animal Groups
Dendrograms are visual diagrams that show how items are grouped hierarchically into clusters. In this lesson, students learn how to read and interpret these diagrams. It is recommended to first explore the clustering process itself (Clusters in the Classroom), so that the concepts behind the dendrograms become clear and meaningful.
Relevance to everyday life
When working with data, we often only know the characteristics of items and want to group similar ones together. This happens in everyday life more often than we realize—for example, a store might look at customers’ shopping habits and group similar shoppers to offer more personalized promotions. There are many ways to do this; in this activity, we explore one of the simpler clustering methods.
Connection with the curriculum
Focusing on reviewing groups of animals, the activity falls into biology.