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BBC's News' "Who is your Olympic Body Match?"

This interactive website from the BBC will match your student, using their height, gender, and weight, to their Rio Olympic body match.


You enter your height, weight, age, and select your gender. It matches you with the athlete who is the most like you. It also provides good examples for distribution, and where you fall on the distribution, for Olympic athletes. I think it also gets students thinking about regression models.

After you enter your data, the page returns information about where you fall on the distribution histogram for Olympic athletes by height, weight, and age for your gender.




Then, the website returns your topic matches:


How to use in class:

1) What other IVs could you collect to determine best sport match (DV)? Family income (I had access to soccer growing up, but not dressage horses)? Average temperature of hometown (My high school had a skiing club but not a beach volleyball club)? This gets your students thinking about multiple regression models.

2) Ask your students to think of the predictive validity of the weight x height x gender x age model. Did it do a good job of making a prediction for them, personally? For instance, I've been down to the shooting range with my retired USAF father and current USAF brother. So, in a way, the data isn't a terrible match for me. Conceptually, this will get your students thinking about how regression is used to make predictions.

3) Distributions bar graphs for discussing distribution, and how Olympic athlete distribution for weight, height, age may be different than average human distributions.

This might be two years late on my part, but I'm still really excited about it. I have been using this version of the same interactive website since the London Olympics. Lo and behold, they re-did the website for the Rio Olympics in 2016.

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