I was trying to find an original way of getting the children to collect data rather than the typical class survey on 'favourites'. I realised that in our school teacher's car park, we had a wealth of collectable data. The children and I went out and gathered information, using tally charts where appropriate, on the cars parked there. We used the following headings;

• Car make
• Car model
• Car colour
• First letter on license plate
• Total of the digits on the license plates
• Number of symbols on the license plate
• The range of the numbers on the license plate
• Month of registration
• Month of warrant of fitness
• etc.

The children then brought their data back to the classroom and created a variety of bar graphs using the information. They also used the totalled license plate numbers to find the range, mean and mode for those plates. It was a very successful investigation and the children were motivated and interested.