Graphing Stories: Gran Turismo

I may have missed the deadline for Dan Meyer's graphing stories extravaganza, but an idea struck me last week for some speed/time graphs.

What I like about this:

• It is something that people have lots of knowledge about, even if they are not particularly into racing games, that they can bring to the discussion on these problems.
• The timer and speedometer are already there so you can verify your answers easily.
• On the video for Gran Turismo 4 it shows the track. I would pause the video at the start and show what part of the track is coming up and invite guesses to the shape of the graph before even showing the video once.
• It allows the decent extensions of acceleration/time graphs and distance/time graphs (although units for that would get a little difficult, getting the general shape would be fairly straightforward)
• There are at least 30 of these tests all filmed on youtube.

Possible shortcomings that come to mind:

• The biggest problem I have with these videos is that the counters and map aren't shown at zero seconds. Didn't the Gran Turismo programmers know that I'd be using their game to teach maths?!
• The videos don't really force us to use our intuition and some pupils may just end up frantically recording the speeds without much thought. (This is negated if you get a guess before even showing the video)

Here are the graphs I get for the video above: