Overview: Students race to link as many cubes as possible in certain time intervals. Using the collected data, students make a scatterplot to make inferences.
Curriculum Expectations:
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Linear Relations: Apply data-management techniques to investigate relationships between two variables.
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Number Sense and Algebra: Solve problems involving proportional reasoning.
Learning Goal:
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To collect and organize data
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Collecting data is useful for making inferences
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To learn about rates and to use them in decision-making
Timing and sequencing: This activity will take one period. This activity serves as a good introduction to data management.
Classroom constructs: Students work in groups of 3 to collect individual data or group data
Materials:
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Linking Cubes (at least 500 ~ 1 box)
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A cellphone or timer per group of 3
Description:
How many cubes could you stack in 10 min?
Discussion with students about:
How we can do/predict this?
Why do we need different time intervals? Why not just one?
Why do we need more than 1 trial for each time period?
Students link as many cubes together as possible for each chosen time interval (e.g. 10s, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s … or 15s, 30s, 45s, …).
Students record data in a table (t-chart) and then as a class, graph the data in a scatterplot.
Draw a line of best fit. Use the line of best fit to extrapolate to 10 min.
Key vocabulary: independent vs dependent variable, correlation, ordered pair, line of best fit, interpolate, extrapolate, scatter plot, outliers
Linear Relations: Apply data-management techniques to investigate relationships between two variables.
Number Sense and Algebra: Solve problems involving proportional reasoning.
To collect and organize data
Collecting data is useful for making inferences
To learn about rates and to use them in decision-making
Linking Cubes (at least 500 ~ 1 box)
A cellphone or timer per group of 3
When I did this activity in my class I treated it as a competition. I timed how many linking cubes each student could put together in 20, 30, 40 and 50 sec intervals and recorded the info on the board in a class data table. Since we had recently been working with scatter plots I used the activity to demonstrate how to make predictions into the future.
ReplyDeleteWe graphed the data with the goal of using the information to predict how many cubes could be put together in 300 seconds. We used a line of best fit to extrapolate. Students had to think about planning their scale accordingly in order to extend their line to 300 s.
As it turns out some students were "cheating" by having some cubes put together before the timer started. This made for an interesting discussion! Their lines of best fit were not correlated as highly as those that were not. Their data had a "jump" that did not make sense and others could call them out on it.
Also, some students did recognize that proportional reasoning could be used to solve this problem.