Movie box office data that is current and very comprehensive. Several different trends are easy to track including exponential, and log functions. Great for using with students to create regression models, making predictions based on the models, checking the results and re-analyzing. Also, when a movie doesn't follow the predictions there are often easy to understand reasons for why the movies behave differently (a holiday weekend may cause the movie to gross more on a given weekend than predicted, etc.)
Report from the National Academies. Summary: "The mathematical sciences are part of nearly all aspects of everyday life-the discipline has underpinned such beneficial modern capabilities as Internet search, medical imaging, computer animation, numerical weather predictions, and all types of digital communications. The Mathematical Sciences in 2025 examines the current state of the mathematical sciences and explores the changes needed for the discipline to be in a strong position and able to maximize its contribution to the nation in 2025. It finds the vitality of the discipline excellent and that it contributes in expanding ways to most areas of science and engineering, as well as to the nation as a whole, and recommends that training for future generations of mathematical scientists should be re-assessed in light of the increasingly cross-disciplinary nature of the mathematical sciences. In addition, because of the valuable interplay between ideas and people from all parts of the mathematical sciences, the report emphasizes that universities and the government need to continue to invest in the full spectrum of the mathematical sciences in order for the whole enterprise to continue to flourish long-term."
Abstract:"Prime Climb is an educational game that provides individual support for learning
number factorization skills in the form of hints based on a model of student learning. Previous
studies with Prime Climb indicated that students may not always be paying attention to
the hints, even when they are justified (i.e. based on a student model's assessment). In this
thesis we will discuss the test-bed game, Prime Climb, and our re-implementation of the
game which allowed us to modify the game dynamically and will allow for more rapid prototyping
in the future. To assist students as they play the game, Prime Climb includes a pedagogical
agent which provides individualized support by providing user-adaptive hints. We
then move into our work with the eye-tracker to better understand if and how students process
the agent's personalized hints. We will conclude with a user study in which we use eyetracking
data to capture user attention patterns as impacted by factors related to existing user
knowledge, hint types, and attitude towards getting help in general. We plan to leverage these
results in the future to make hint delivery more effective."
"In this paper, we will describe work that we have done in this direction using as a test-bed an edu-game for number factorization, Prime Climb. This game includes a pedagogical agent that provides adaptive interventions during game playing based on a model of student learning [13, 18]. Here we focus on how we re-implemented the original Prime Climb game into a framework that enables rapid prototyping and testing of different design hypothesis. We also discuss preliminary work on using eye tracking data on user attention patterns to better understand if and how students process the agent‟s adaptive interventions." (from the introduction)