Illustrative Mathematics
Weather Graph Data
Teaching young mathematicians about collecting and analyzing data allows for a variety of fun and engaging activities. Here, children observe the weather every day for a month, recording their observations in the form of a bar graph....
Fort Bend Independent School District
Data Analysis - AP Statistics
What better way to study survey design than to design your own survey! Bring a versatile data analysis project to your AP Statistics class, and encourage them to apply the practices from their instructions to a real-world survey...
PBL Pathways
College Costs 2
What is the financial benefit for attending a community college for the first two years before transferring to a four-year college? The second part of the educational lesson asks young scholars to explore this question through data...
Regents Prep
Activity to Show Sample Population and Bias
There is bias in many aspects of our lives, and math is no exception! Learners explore provided data to understand the meaning of biased and random samples. The resource includes various data sets from the same population, and...
101 Questions
Breaking a Record
Can we break the record? Groups use provided data detailing the number of visitors to a blog to determine if the number of blog views breaks the previous record. They must take rates into consideration to make their estimates—a great...
Education Development Center
Interpreting Statistical Measures—Class Scores
Explore the effect of outliers through an analysis of mean, median, and standard deviation. Your classes examine and compare these measures for two groups. They must make sense of a group that has a higher mean but lower median compared...
Illustrative Mathematics
Rolling Dice
Rolling dice is a great way for your mathematicians to get a hands-on approach to probabilities. Use the chart to record whether they rolled a six during ten attempts. Calculate results individually (or in small groups) and then record...
Computer Science Unplugged
Lightest and Heaviest—Sorting Algorithms
How do computers sort data lists? Using eight unknown weights and a balance scale, groups determine the order of the weights from lightest to heaviest. A second worksheet provides the groups with other methods to order the weights. The...
Curated OER
Music and Sports
With so much talent in the classroom, do your musicians and athletes have related interests? This problem has your learners taking data from their classmates to decide whether there is an association between the two activities. The...
Curated OER
Flipping for a Grade
What happens when your teachers get tired of grading tests and want to use games of chance to determine your grade? How would you decide which game they should play? Learn how to use expected value and standard notation to compare two...
American Chemical Society
Preparation and Combustion of Biodiesel
The United States is the world's largest producer of biofuel. During an in-class investigation, young scientists produce their own biodiesel. They burn a sample of it to determine the heat of combustion. Then they discuss the...
Teach Engineering
Spring Away!
The last segment of the nine-part unit makes a connection between springs and linear equations. Groups hang weights from the spring and measure its length. Then, using the data collected, they calculate the slope to find the k-value...
Royal Society of Chemistry
Mass Changes in Chemical Reactions—Microscale Chemistry
What better way is there to introduce conservation of mass than a few simple experiments? Young chemists conduct two chemical reactions, take the masses of reactants and products, then compare their results to determine...
Illustrative Mathematics
Puzzle Times
Give your mathematicians this set of data and have them create a dot plot, then find mean and median. They are asked to question the values of the mean and median and decide why they are not equal. Have learners write their answers or...
US Department of Commerce
The New Normal
Don't be normal ... be exceptional in understanding statistics. Pupils analyze six different sets of census data using histograms or normal probability plots to determine whether each data set fits a normal distribution. They then get...
Teach Engineering
Earthquakes Living Lab: Locating Earthquakes
There are patterns in nearly everything — even earthquakes. Pairs research current earthquakes to see if there are any patterns. They determine the mean, median, and mode of the earthquake data, along with the maximum and...
University of Wisconsin
Follow the Drop
Young surveyors look for patterns in water flow around campus. Using a map of the school (that you will need to create), they mark the direction of the path of water. They also perform calculations for the volume that becomes runoff. The...
Big Kid Science
Exploring Shadows
What's that lurking in the shadows? An activity that demonstrates how eclipses happen. Science scholars investigate how light and distance interact to form shadows. The experiment uses simple materials to generate data and observations...
Illustrative Mathematics
Speed Trap
In which direction is traffic moving faster, north or south? Use box and whisker plots to organize data and interpret the results. Detailed solutions are included. This activity would be good as a warm up or quick assessment at the...
Curated OER
Shadow Chasing
The students compare themselves and their shadows to various objects big and small. Students use their data to set up proportions to solve.
Wake Forest University
Authentic Activities for Connecting Mathematics to the Real World
Check out the handout from a presentation that contains a collection of high school algebra projects connecting a variety of mathematics to the real world. Activities range from simple probabilities to calculus. The activities...
Howard County Schools
Planning for Prom
Make the most of your prom—with math! Pupils write and use a quadratic model to determine the optimal price of prom tickets. After determining the costs associated with the event, learners use a graph to analyze the break even point(s).
Serendip
Carbohydrate Consumption, Athletic Performance and Health – Using Science Process Skills to Understand the Evidence
Should athletes carb load before an event or consume carbohydrates during the competition? Scholars discuss how to set up a hypothesis and experiment to answer a question relating carbohydrates and athletic performance. Then, they read...
Illustrative Mathematics
Sarah, the chimpanzee
Is Sarah, the chimpanzee, smart or just a lucky guesser? Here, learners set up a simulation and read a dotplot to find out the likelihood of getting 7 out of 8 questions correct. One suggested modification would be to have your class...