Oscars 2013
Students develop their own ideas about compounded percent change while they have the opportunity to speak about the upcoming Academy Awards show.
Worldwide box office income is compared for the top ten grossing movies of all time. Is total gross the most appropriate way to judge the popularity of a movie? How does inflation and increasing ticket prices come into play? Inflation rates are used to let students calculate how the money of 1997 compares to the money of 2011. The idea of this comparison is to encourage students to develop their own understanding of exponential growth.
This activity is accessible to students as young as 5th or 6th grade once they have familiarized themselves with computing with exponents and percents. The activity is appropriate for students in middle school or even high school as students generalize a formula for finding the adjusted for inflation earnings of any movie.
CCSS: 7.NS.3, A-CED.1, F-LE.1, F-LE.2
For members we have Word docs, an Excel sheet and solutions.
highest-grossing-movies.doc highest-grossing-movies-solutions.pdf
Two more Oscar’s related activities: You can also use either of our last year’s activities, Movie ticket prices over time or How many movies can you see in one day to bring the excitement of the Academy Awards into your classroom.
Comments (2)
Wreck it Ralph? Is that really supposed to be #3? I can’t find data to back this up…
Hi Lance. When I created the post, Wreck it was 3rd. Now the numbers are different at http://www.imdb.com/boxoffice/alltimegross?region=world-wide
Do you think that I should redo the activity with the present numbers? Thanks. We need all of the help that we can get. Leslie