Math and the Internet.

  When I was in Denver attending a conference, someone commented the Internet has undergone exponential growth.  Exponential?  I can almost believe the claim but think about letting students explore that to figure out if it is true.

This site has a wonderful chart describing the growth of the internet from December 1995 to December 2017.  It provides information on number of people who used the internet and the percent of the world population.

This would be a perfect thing to do a project on.  Students could create an excel spreadsheet to show the growth, determine the percent increase each year, figure out if the numbers justify the claim of exponential growth.  Students could even calculate the world population and its increase.  Just a couple of pieces of information and lots of fun things to calculate.

This site offers a 16 slide presentation showing a wonderful breakdown of information of who was using the internet in January 2012 from various geographic regions for the internet, social, and mobile uses.  This would be wonderful again for additional charts showing world wide uses by topic and geographic regions or provide a breakdown for the world based on combining all of the information.


What about letting students learn to read interactive charts.  This interactive site has an interactive chart showing the growth of internet uses by each geographic region, the current breakdown of internet uses by country, cell phone users world wide, and broadband penetration.  Several have the information displayed by chart and/or map, provides downloadable data files, and lists information sources.

If you'd prefer to have students compare domains, this site has two charts with the numbers. By comparing and calculating the growth over the years, students get a different perspective. 

It is easy to have students use the sites to create different graphs to compare the information in different forms before explaining which graph they believe is best to provide the information.  Not every type of graph can be used for every type of information.

If students choose one of the first three sites to create a report on the growth of the internet.  In the report, they should include the graphs which could show the growth itself, or percent growth and then explain what they see.  If the data indicates exponential growth, they could create an equation to fit the data.  They could also predict the numbers of users in 5, 10, or 15 years based on current growth trends.

This is applied real world math which requires students to analyze data they are given which is what mathematicians do in real life.

Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.