Category Archives for Data and Probability
Triple Crown
I’ll Have Another May 19th will be the running of the Preakness thoroughbred horse race. The Preakness is the second race of the Triple Crown. Hopefully we’ll see the horse, I’ll Have Another, win the Preakness and get a chance to … Continue reading
Mother’s Day 2012
Mother’s Day is right around the corner and this means big business for the greeting card and floral industries. Let your students practice averages, percents, and large numbers while they analyze the statistics on Mother’s Day spending. You could even … Continue reading
Season 11 American Idol
Let your student study American Idol viewing figures over the last ten seasons. Students compare historical season premier and season finale audience size in several different ways to determine which event has had higher viewership. They consider outliers and judge … Continue reading
Video game download
ACT ONE: Describe situation and show video and pic below. I decided to download a couple demo video games from the Wii online store. Both of the games are free demo versions that I download directly to my Wii console. … Continue reading
On Pace
Albert Pujols, an eleven year veteran ball player with the St. Louis Cardinals, just signed a ten-year, $240 million dollar contract with the Los Angeles Angles. Albert has been one of the best offensive players in baseball during his career. … Continue reading
Holiday candy sales 2012
Another Candy holiday is upon us. Brian asks students to translate a pie chart of information on candy sale expenditures to actual dollars spent for 4 major candy holidays … Halloween, Easter, Christmas and Hanuka, and Valentine’s Day. Serve a … Continue reading
Opening weekend
Hunger Games is the latest popular movie to make a big weekend splash. Can you tell from its opening weekend how the movie will do in the long run? This activity can be done for any new movie on the … Continue reading
Big Bucks
Peyton Manning and Albert Pujols signed big contracts during the winter of 2011-2012, paying each of them millions. Lets take a look at some of the world’s biggest sports contracts from the NBA, the NFL, MLB and European Football (what … Continue reading
Budget 2012
Show our debt clock to your class and ask your students some questions. What do you see happening on this clock? When will the U. S. hit the next trillion dollars deficit milestone? How fast is the deficit increasing every … Continue reading
Green, green river
During the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago, the local plumbers union dyes the Chicago River emerald green. Students learn what PPM (parts per million) means and attempt to figure out how much dye is used to sufficiently color the … Continue reading
Tornadoes 2012
Involve your students in better understanding of the damage caused by tornadoes by using our investigation. Students will learn about the Enhanced Fujita Scale (EF scale), the usual locations and the time of year when tornadoes are most likely to … Continue reading
It sure is cold out … or is it?
Students ponder the relationship between place latitudes and average January temperatures while they try to discover a correlation. Is this a linear or near linear relationship? … averaging, missing data for averaging, line of best fit, Google Earth, world locations, … Continue reading
Linsanity
Jeremy Lin is the New York Knicks most startling player. His story is exciting in that he graduated from Harvard in 2010 and was not immediately drafted into the NBA. At first he was playing in the NBA Development League … Continue reading
All Star Game 2012
The NBA All Star game is being held on February 26th. Did you know that this was the third major professional sport all star game in the last month. The NFL Pro Bowl and the NHL All Star Game were … Continue reading
