This week for class we worked out of the computer lab! Here we talked mostly of data management and statistics, and began by guessing how many cookies were in a jar. The jar was roughly the shape of a cube and many people attempted to answer based on a rough calculation of volume (in units of cookies!). I had taken a different approach. From where I was, I could see two types of Oreos, regular and Golden. I therefore assumed that there were two bags in the container, and went about estimating based on this assumption. I think Oreos used to come in packages with four rows when I was a kid, but the new resealable bags contain three rows (does knowing this mean I eat too many cookies?). I usually buy Double Stuf, which are arranged in rows along the width of the package, and I assumed regular Oreos were as well. This however is wrong, as regular Oreos come in packages with rows that are arranged lengthwise. With three rows, I knew the number in the bag must be divisible by 3, meaning the number for two bags must be divisible by 6. I assumed there were roughly ten cookies in each row, or 30 per package, so my estimate for the two bags was 60. If my assumptions were correct, moving by increments of 6 meant there could be ...54, 60, 66, 72... total. The actual number however was shown to be much higher than the majority of the class predicted (and not divisible by 6). It was over 100! It was revealed that there were actually three kinds of cookies in the jar, which demonstrate how making assumptions can sometimes lead you terribly astray. The stem and leaf plot for the activity showed that most of the class thought the number would be in the range of 60-70. We found the mean, median, and mode for this data and determined that it didn't really tell us anything meaningful in light of the actual number in the jar.
We then explored the program Tinkerplots. This wasn't something I had heard of before and I found it incredibly versatile and useful. I love analyzing data, but have found more than a few times that I might waste a lot of time graphing two data sets to find no correlation whatsoever. Tinkerplots lets you include a wide array of parameters for each element of a set, and you can easily manipulate and compare each. This would be very useful in the classroom because students are often asked to make meaningless graphs, and it generally wastes a lot of time. Tinkerplots comes loaded with some data and therefore students can immediately explore the different relationships and ways of displaying them without having to find a ruler for every student.
For one activity we used Geometer's Sketchpad, a program I had used many, many years ago in school. I was surprised that it seemed not to have changed in all these years, and the functionality was still very limited. While you can make lines and polygons and circles fairly easily, I could not find a way to adjust side lengths or angles to a certain value, and instead had to drag points around endlessly and still ended up with slightly lopsided quadrilaterals. While exploring the capabilities of the program, I right-clicked (looking for a way to make the previously mentioned adjustments) and found the animate button. It was all down-hill from there as colourful polygons danced around my screen... I found Geometer's Sketchpad to be a pretty fruitless activity, and unless I missed some very significant features, I am not sure how I might use it in the classroom effectively.
