The International Association for Statistical Education (IASE) is running a free webinar on June 10 at 10 PM for teachers of Year 1–9 students on how Finland is approaching AI education and literacy through its six-year national strategic research program. Register here
Kia ora koutou,
We’re starting work on next year’s CensusAtSchool questionnaire and would love your help to keep it relevant and engaging.
There is no fixed commitment. You can contribute as much or as little as you like, from a five-minute review to trialing a draft survey with your class.
If you’re interested in helping shape the survey, please contact us to let us know.
As covered in our Behind the Questions Guide, this process includes:
- Deciding which questions to keep, update, or remove.
- Sifting through student-submitted questions from the current survey.
- Proposing new questions and testing them with students.
- Checking survey length, Māori translation, technical functionality, and external review by the Ministry of Education, Stats NZ, and Stats NZ’s questionnaire design team.
We look for questions that are:
- Engaging, positive, relevant, easy for young students to understand and answer, and engaging for students.
- Suitable for a variety of data analysis activities and time-series comparisons.
- Covering well-being, lifestyle, interests, and opinions, and avoiding illegal or unsafe behaviours.
- Also asked by Stats NZ in official data surveys and international CensusAtSchool partners.
Do you use iNZight Lite, or do you want to learn how to use it?
iNZight Lite is a free, browser-based tool to help high school students analyse data. Students can import their own dataset or explore built-in examples, using visualisation, transformation, and statistical analysis.
We’ve put together a guide for teachers with tutorials to get started, plus exercises and videos.
Have you seen our Year 9 Summary Investigations Teaching Sequence?
This is a suggested set of 12 lessons with a focus on the students collecting data about themselves. The materials were developed in conjunction with and trialled by Auckland Girls’ Grammar School, Lynfield College, and Northcote College mathematics and statistics departments.
Probability Resources for Year 4–6
See seven resources on our website, including the Great Coin Toss Challenge, Lucky Seven Dice Rolling, and the Last One Standing Game.
FIFA World Cup
Kicking off in less than a month on 11 June, the tournament features the All Whites making their third-ever appearance. New Zealand plays its opening match on 16 June, marking their first qualification for FIFA since 2010.
If you make data cards or other activities, or see any good resources for statistics classrooms, please let us know!
Tomorrow is World Stationery Day. Here are some ideas for how to incorporate this into your classroom:
Pen vs. Pencil
“Do Year [X] students write more words per minute with a pen or a pencil?”
Have half your class start with a pencil and the other half with a pen for a 1-minute writing sprint, then swap. It’s a fantastic way to discuss measurement error, reproducibility, and individual variability.
Gel Pen vs. Ballpoint Pen
A 2025 study in the American Journal of Human Psychology showed that gel pens significantly outperformed ballpoint pens in both writing speed and total word count. This study provides an excellent real-world context for teaching concepts such as paired t-tests and the Wilcoxon Rank Test, and the distinction between statistical significance and practical effect size.
Tomorrow (April 22) is Earth Day. Here are some ideas for how to incorporate this into your classroom:
- What sorts of insects are common in the grass areas of our school? Survey Your Environment – PPDAC cycle (Years 1–3)
- How are students’ travel methods to school changing over time? We have the data going back to 2005! Interestingly, car usage has remained flat at 40%. The real shift is happening elsewhere: walking has dropped from 26% to 21%, while bus usage has grown from 23% to 28%. You could also explore travel time to school.
- How are students’ opinions about climate change/global warming changing over time? Explore CensusAtSchool data. We have the data going back to 2005!
Our World in Data
Publishes research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems: Poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality. For example, did you know that oil spills from tankers have fallen by more than 90% since the 1970s? And deforestation is no longer inevitable?
GapMinder
Gapminder is an independent educational non-profit fighting global misconceptions. See how people really live around the world. And how well do you know New Zealand stats?
Figure.NZ
Figure.NZ’s mission is to get the people of New Zealand using data to thrive. Figure.NZ helps everyone understand the things they care about, so they can make great choices.
Kaggle
Register for free to access over 50,000 datasets. Popular datasets include Trending YouTube Videos, Time Spent Streaming Music, and Starbucks Orders.
Data.govt.nz
New Zealand Government project with almost 30,000 datasets. There are many similar open data repositories, e.g., Australia, Europe, OECD, UK, USA, and the World Bank.
TidyTuesday Datasets
Explore datasets from the TidyTuesday project. The older datasets tend to have Excel or csv files.
Litter Intelligence
Explore New Zealand litter data. Led by New Zealand charity Sustainable Coastlines, the programme works in close collaboration with the Ministry for the Environment, Department of Conservation and Statistics New Zealand.
Motor Vehicle Database
This database contains all currently registered vehicles and is updated monthly.
Google’s Dataset Search Engine
This tool aims to foster a data-sharing ecosystem that encourages data publishers to follow best practices for data storage and publication and gives scientists a way to demonstrate the impact of their work by citing the datasets they have produced.
It was wonderful seeing so many teachers at last year’s Statistics Teachers’ Day in Auckland. Planning is already underway for this year’s event!
Later this year, we’ll let you know the overarching theme and put out a call for workshops and talks.
In the meantime, save the date:
Statistics Teachers’ Day 2026
Friday November 27
The 2025-2026 CensusAtSchool questionnaire is open! Participation is available throughout the year, giving you lots of time to get involved. We’d love for you to take part with your students.
Register, take part, and get the data
Other Upcoming Events
PMA Seminar Day, Auckland, March 7, 2026
Mark your calendars! The Primary Mathematics Association’s Seminar Day is back on Saturday, 7 March 2026, at the Waipuna Conference Centre. This year’s theme, “Enhancing & Enriching,” focuses on marrying proven classroom “gold” with the refreshed curriculum.
Dr Vince Wright’s keynote session, Implementing a ‘knowledge-rich’ mathematics curriculum, will dive into the new Mathematics and Statistics Curriculum, exploring how to help students not just “know” maths, but “know why” it works and “know when” to apply it.
It is a fantastic local opportunity to get practical guidance on the revised curriculum and connect with fellow Auckland educators.
View the programme and register now
ICOTS 12, Brisbane, July 12–17, 2026
A world-class professional development opportunity is coming to our doorstep. Brisbane is hosting the 12th International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS), the first time this huge event has been held in the Southern Hemisphere.
Centered on the theme “What? Who? When? How?”, the conference features global experts from Duke, Oxford, and UCLA. Sessions are designed specifically for school-level educators to explore new strategies in assessment and data science. It is a rare chance to bring the latest global trends in data literacy directly back to your New Zealand classroom.
Teaching Resource
Pachinkogram
A great visualisation of conditional probabilities. Recommended by Michael Walden. Learn more by checking out his 2025 Statistics Teachers’ Day keynote: Integrating Technology in the Classroom.
Have you seen or created a resource we should share? Let us know!
Have a wonderful week,
Rachel, Anne & Pip
The 2025-2026 Census is open! Participation is available throughout the year, giving you lots of time to get involved.
Register, prepare, take part, and explore the data
Upcoming Events
PMA Seminar Day, Auckland, March 7, 2026
Mark your calendars! The Primary Mathematics Association’s Seminar Day is back on Saturday, 7 March 2026, at the Waipuna Conference Centre. This year’s theme, “Enhancing & Enriching,” focuses on marrying proven classroom “gold” with the refreshed curriculum.
Dr Vince Wright’s keynote session, Implementing a ‘knowledge-rich’ mathematics curriculum, will dive into the new Mathematics and Statistics Curriculum, exploring how to help students not just “know” maths, but “know why” it works and “know when” to apply it.
It is a fantastic local opportunity to get practical guidance on the revised curriculum and connect with fellow educators.
View the programme and register now
ICOTS 12, Brisbane, July 12–17, 2026
A world-class professional development opportunity is coming to our doorstep. Brisbane is hosting the 12th International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS), the first time this huge event has been held in the Southern Hemisphere.
Centered on the theme “What? Who? When? How?”, the conference features global experts from Duke, Oxford, and UCLA. Sessions are designed specifically for school-level educators to explore new strategies in assessment and data science. It is a rare chance to bring the latest global trends in data literacy directly back to your New Zealand classroom.
Teaching Resource
Pin Number Analysis
A deep dive into what people choose as their pin numbers. Recommended by Michael Walden. Learn more by checking out his 2025 Statistics Teachers’ Day keynote: Integrating Technology in the Classroom.
Have you seen or created a resource we should share? Let us know!
Have a wonderful week,
Rachel, Anne & Pip
