This semester my geography class was required to track confirmed cases of swine flu and swine flu deaths by country. Although each student in the group did focus only on one continent or region. I'm trying to find another couple of topics to use for the spring semester, but so far can only come up with tracking the US dollar versus foreign currencies. What I need to find is something that meets the following criteria: 1. can be relatively easily found on-line. 2. updates at least once or twice a week. 3. Covers at minimum 3 of the following continents/regions: USA, Europe, South/Central America, Africa, Asia. 4. Provides the data at the country level; i.e. it needs to list the countries and data for each country. As noted, right now I can only think of currency, unless another pandemic occurs. Furthermore, the project lasts for 14 weeks, so whatever it the topic needs to probably last at least that long, although I could modify to as little as 12 weeks. Any help would be appreciated.
Well, to keep it relevant with current day events, you could always use gas prices. I'm sure there's some site out there that keeps track of national average prices.
I like the idea of tracking economic data - what about observing the inter-relationship between major stock indices and commodity prices? There's a complex set of feedback relationships to be unpicked here, that would lend itself to a number of different statistical approaches. Alternatively, for something a bit more populist, pick a set of celebrities from different parts of the world, and track their popularity (as measured by total number of google hits, for example, or just use google trends) and see which students "win" by tracking the set of celebrities whose popularity value goes up the most over time (I seem to recall an internet game that used this principle, so I can't take credit for this idea, but it sounds like it could work for you).
My firs thought was trade of some kind. You could choose a specific item. Cars, pens, footwear, whatever. There's a bunch. Suggested resource if you haven't seen it: The CIA World Factbook. Up to date (for some reason ) and has a lot of info on each country. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html
Your first idea sounds extremely good; your second sounds like I could do something, maybe exam the reported grosses of particular movies across the world. Thanks.