Scooter Race Statistics
Mon, 07/29/2013 - 13:32 — Nancy Johnson
Strategy Category:
Instructional activities
Meeting diverse student needs
Grade Level:
Middle/Junior High
Content Area:
Mathematics
Other content area(s):
Could be adapted to others Materials or Resources:
Scooters, timer or stopwatch, paper pencil, calculator
Preparation:
Some basic understanding of mean, median, mode and range, plus how to find them
Activity Length:
40minutes
Activity or Strategy Description:
My classes met in an unused gym for the day and we had three students at a time race from one end of the gym and back on scooters. I recorded the time it took each student and transferred that date back to the SMARTBoard when we went back to the classroom. The purpose was to involve students in getting the data needed to practice analyzing data and finding the measures of central tendency. When students could put our races into the context of statistics, the numbers they found for mean, median, mode, and range had a real meaning. This was some of the richest discussion we had all year, especially that on deciding which of the four was the most accurate representation for our class's time.