Gemma Crowell

September 23, 2015

Artifact Description: Utilizing Microsoft Excel to create a spreadsheet of the first 300 letters of a
Robert Frost poem.
What you learned: I have learned to use the Excel software to create a tabulation of the letters
and an accompanying graph. The process of finding the number and the percentage of a
particular letter in the poem, made me think I was entering grades on the columns. The process
of entering numbers in columns can be tiresome, and even boring, because it had to be repeated
again and again, even when the numbers are different. However, I did learn to use the "Find"
command, so that helped in speeding up the counting.
National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS)S Addressed: Standard #4
Students use critical thinking skills to plan and conduct research, manage projects, solve
problems, and make informed decisions using appropriate digital tools and resources. Found at
http://www.iste.org/standards/iste-standards/standards-for-students.
Application of Skills learned for the Future: In schools, students could be taught to store and
present data using spreadsheets, and make tables and graphs as a supplement for any research
topic. It can be useful in a science project during science fairs, when students supplement their
projects with graphs and tables. It would help the students in any other class that needs data to be
presented in a way that shows their math skills from researching, planning and plotting concepts,
to exploring changes or patterns, and predicting and calculating probability results or outcomes,
etc. It would probably be used more in geometry, statistics, algebra, or a basic math class.