In this activity students study historical Super Bowl data to reflect on average (mean, median, and mode), losing scores, winning scores, and range of scores. They are asked to judge which of these central measurements seem the most meaningful and explain their reasoning.
Do the “Best” movies make the most money? How could you measure the “best” movie? What information would you need to make this judgement? At most ten movies are nominated each year to receive an Oscar for the Best Picture. On Sunday, February…
What will a 30-second Super Bowl ad cost this year? Next year? In the future? How would you describe this rise in cost?
Tornadoes have devastated the Midwest, U.S. in the last few days. Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Mississippi have been brutally hit with these powerful events. Involve your students in a better understanding of the ranking and…
Which movie do you think is the highest grossing holiday movie of all time? Students analyze holiday movie data. They will round, estimate, compare, calculate percent increase, consider the most appropriate graphical representation and graph the data.
Consumers in the U.S. spend a lot of money. In this activity we look at historical data to see if there are any patterns in our spending. How does our holiday spending show up in these graphs? What accounts for…
Apple just announced their new, 10th anniversary, iPhones, the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X. These phones will soon be in stores, the iPhone 8 comes out on September 22, 2017. The iPhone X is available as of November 3rd. …
There have been a lot of polls about who will win the Presidential election. I get so confused when polling results are reported. What is a 95% confidence measure? What’s the margin of error? What is standard deviation? In this…
Facebook is so accepted in our world today that it is even part of nightly news broadcasts as people are noted for receiving huge numbers of likes in appreciation or interest. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, is…
Hey, the playoffs are about to begin. The best teams from the leagues compete to determine the champion. Must be some really great teams! But wait, the 2014-15 Carolina Panthers made the NFL playoffs by winning the NFC South with a…
Thursday, February 14, 2019, is Valentine’s Day. Start the “love hoopla” with this graphic on where all of the flowers come from. This is part of the graphic from http://visual.ly/valentines-day-facts What fraction of these roses are shaded red? The red ones…
There have been a lot of cruise ship mishaps and disasters this year. While these are in the news, let your students consider how these floating cities manage their resources and which of their needs are precarious as they calculate…
Time to give students some authentic math on a topic they will surely be interested in … Starbucks. We ask and answer a few questions in this activity. About how many drinks does Starbucks sell in a year? If I…
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,…
On Thursday evening Leslie and Brian spoke at Boston College as part of the ATMIM (Association of Teachers of Mathematics in Massachusetts) Winter Conference. Our presentation was on making mathematics meaningful to students. We shared, did and discussed math activities…