How many Twitter followers does Taylor Swift gain every day? How many followers will she have next Friday if she keeps up the same rate?

Social media is everywhere in today’s society, especially for young people. Incorporating social media into a math lesson can be incredibly beneficial to student engagement and interest because social media is so embedded in teenage culture. In this activity, students monitor a popular celebrity on Twitter (or Instagram, Facebook, etc.) by recording how many followers he or she has each day. Students will record this data for several days and use these data points to create a scatter plot on the coordinate plane. After several days, students will be able to analyze the graph, identify trends, and maybe even use a linear model to estimate future values.

For this example, I chose to follow Taylor Swift because she is relevant to young adolescents, has a significant social media presence, and is generally appropriate in the content she posts (this last reason is very important!). If you would prefer to make this a one-day activity rather than a several-day process of collecting data, you can find existing data points at websites like Twitter Counter. However, the process of looking up new data each day and predicting new quantities is deeply valuable for student understanding and investment in the activity.

This lesson addresses CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.8.F.A.1, CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.8.F.B.4, and CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.8.F.B.5 in the Common Core State Standards for Math. The lesson also addresses GLE 1.1.2 in the 6th-8th Grade Washington State Standards for Educational Technology.