Math and teaching about the Ecological Footprint go hand in hand. Below are various activities to teach both areas.

Objectives:

Grade 9:
SP9.1
Demonstrate understanding of the effect of:
  • bias
  • use of language
  • ethics
  • cost
  • time and timing
  • privacy
  • cultural sensitivity and
  • population or sample
on data collection. [C, PS, R, T]

Grade 11:
FM20.1
Demonstrate understanding of the mathematics involved in an historical event or an area of interest. [C, CN, ME, PS, R, T, V]
WA20.11
Extend and apply understanding of representing data using graphs including:
  • bar graphs
  • histograms
  • line graphs
  • circle graphs.
[C, CN, PS, R, T, V]

Grade 12:
FM30.8
Research and give a presentation of a current event or an area of interest that requires data collection and analysis. [C, CN, ME, PS, R, T, V]
WA30.9
Extend and apply understanding of measures of central tendency to solve problems including: mean median mode weighted mean trimmed mean. [C, CN, PS, R]


Activities:

This is a website with a Math lesson on calculating Ecological Footprints. It involves statistics and can be modified for any High School Math class.

This website contains a detailed lesson plan plus data collection sheets for manually calculating ecological footprints. This would be good for a Math 9, 20, and 30 and can also relate to statistics such as Mean, Median, and Mode. This data could be plotted using various graphs to show students how data can be represented differently.

Students can complete on a project (individually or as a group) that involves researching ecological footprints. Students can determine how different ecological footprints calculators calculate how many hectares or worlds a person uses. They can also determine how different components of the ecological footprint affect the overall total of the calculation.