Graphing Stories is a website with many real-life, fifteen-second videos that students can watch and then graph what they see. These videos have contexts ranging from baseball to ponies and from carnivals to paper airplanes, and there is always some relationship between a quantity (height, weight, amount, distance, etc.) and time. Students try to graph the relationship they see and then compare their graphs to the graph provided at the end of each video. Anyone can view every video on Graphing Stories for free as long as he or she has internet connection.
The purpose of Graphing Stories is to get students to see and identify relationships in a variety of situations. Students will also get more practice with reasoning quantitatively and graphing these relationships. Students will have the opportunity to see how certain quantities change with respect to time and then attempt to graph the relationship they see.
Graphing Stories is directed towards both middle and high school teachers as well as their students. In the "how to use" box on the home page, the instructions say to give a handout to your students, which is directed towards teachers to use as part of a lesson or other learning task. However, if students want more practice graphing, they can easily print out the graphs (or make their own) and look at the stories on their own time. A former high school math teacher and Buzzmath, a math learning website for middle school students, collaborated to create Graphing Stories. Many of the relationships in the videos are fairly easy to identify and graph, but anyone who wants to learn or practice quantitative reasoning and become better at graphing certain situations can use Graphing Stories to his or her benefit.