I should have invested!


People who have invested their money in the stock markets could have made a lot of money in recent years.  Students use yearly percent increase data to decide which stock: Apple, Disney or Amazon, they should have invested in way back in 2015.

  • What was the net gain of these stocks?
  • How do you figure that?
  • Does the arithmetic or geometric average of those increases equal their total gain or loss over the years?

Middle school students can access this activity by finding percent increases & decreases.  Students can either approximate an annual growth rate or find an exact growth rate by finding the geometric mean of the growth rates. Older students can apply nth roots and write exponential functions to model investment growth over time.  

Read more →

Halloween spending 2021

National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics

Every year Americans spend a lot on Halloween and Halloween costumes. In this year of Covid restrictions, the numbers of people planning to go to Halloween parties or trick-or-treating has gone down.  But people are still celebrating the holiday.

Use our current data on Halloween spending in America to engage your students in an analysis of the ratios and percents of population, participation, and money spent in honor of October 31st.  This activity takes kids through finding parts of wholes as well as ratio, percents and proportion problems.  Beware: the tasks in this activity involve some large numbers as well as some challenging fraction/ratio/proportion problems.

Read more →

Indigenous Peoples or Columbus Day

*** Two activities ***

When Columbus landed in Guanahani (renamed San Salvador, Bahama Islands by Columbus), he began the European settlement of the New World. Guanahani was inhabited by the Taíno people and it wasn't really a new world.

In this activity students learn a little history, question what they have learned earlier, and calculate how far off Columbus was from East India and his understanding of the actual circumference of the Earth.

The activity: IndigenousPeoplesDay.pdf

Read more →

Chuck E. Cheese needed to shred

Restaurants have been having a hard time and Chuck E. Cheese, with their arcade games and hands on everything, needed to declare bankruptcy during the pandemic. 7 BILLION previously printed tickets needed to be destroyed before customers could get their hands on them. It cost 2.3 million dollars to shred those tickets. This is a cost-saving expense since the company claims that those tickets have a value of  9 MILLION dollars. Is this value reasonable?

Read more →