REACH FOR THE STARS 2009
National Literacy & Numeracy Week

Background
The Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers has been conducting Reach for the Stars as part of National Literacy and Numeracy Week since 2003. Previous investigations have explored our height and the size of our feet (2003 and 2007), how we travel to school (2004), the features of "Money Trails" and the minting dates of circulating Australian coins (2005), a series of balloon relays (2006) and a national coin-throwing experiment with more than half a million recorded throws (2008)!
The common theme is one of classes collecting data locally, submitting their results to a national data collection via the Internet, and exploring their own findings as well as a summary of the data collected by participants from across Australia.
What's in a Name?
This year's activities involved analysing letters in the first names of students and creating a graphical representation of the results. Some of the things we looked at were:

• The number of letters/characters in students' names;
• The number of boys/girls whose names begin with each letter (A, B, C, etc.);
• The number of times each letter is used in boys'/girls' names
• Names with particular characteristics, e.g. palindromes, letters in alphabetical order, highest and lowest consonant:vowel ratios, any other notable characteristics.