Statistics and Probability:
General

Animal Traces

Tracing these unusual animals will teach students about speed, polygons, and circles.

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Bobcat Stats

Imagine you have been assigned to care for a male bobcat in a zoo. You measure the animal’s weight and height (carefully!), and find that it is 24 inches high and weighs 7.2 kilograms.

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Critically Acclaimed Desserts

Chef Von Frugel had a list of the favorite desserts of New York’s five biggest food critics. But he lost the list.

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Candy Graphs

Figuring out how many pieces of candy are in a large jar calls for some tasty data collection and analysis.

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Computer Problems

What kinds of math problems could you have to solve in a company that builds computers?

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Digital Statistics

Measuring their own hands gives students an opportunity to flex their knowledge of statistics.

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Egg Rolls

This unusual relay race combines the math topics of polygons, measurement, and speed.

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Get Your Red-Hot Solar Panels!

You will need to explain in your one-sheet how quickly the panels will repay their purchase price, based on local electricity costs that you must determine. You should find a way to illustrate this point.

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Heads or Tails

A probability experiment that demonstrates what it really means to say that a tossed coin will come up heads one-half of the time.

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Hot Dog!

Gus keeps track of how many hot dogs he sells each. Here is the information Gus has collected in the last two weeks.

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How Many Bugs?

Estimate how many bugs are here.

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Mix and Match

Choosing an outfit can be an exercise in applying the counting principle.

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Movie Poster

We have been commissioned to create a new poster. Please come up with a proposal for this poster.

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Peanuts

Students should discover an interesting pattern when they measure and graph the lengths of peanuts.

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Popcorn Drop

This statistics activity is based on a game in which the pieces can be eaten.

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Recycling Proposal

Your city wishes to develop an effective recycling program similar to the one we have here in Seattle, and would like you to prepare a proposal for getting it done.

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Robot Rover

Testing of the kinds of motors that will be used on the wheels shows that the probability that a motor will fail in 60 days of start-stop-start running is 3 out of a thousand, or 0.003.

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Rolling Cans

Students discover for themselves the relationship between the diameter and the circumference of a circle.

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Skateboard Flex

One important quality of a skateboard is its “flex”—how far the deck will bend when weight is put on it, and how well it snaps back to its original shape.

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Tetradice

An unusual kind of dice will help students learn more about statistics and probability.

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The Tallest Dog

Which is bigger, a Saint Bernard or a Great Dane? You can figure out the answer to this question with the following information provided by veterinarian about some of her patients in each breed.

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