Math Reflection Week 10: Probability and Data Management

  For this week our class was focused on data management and probability.  For me personally I always enjoyed probability and data management, I always see it as kind of a game.  For probability this outlook seems obvious as often lessons in probability involve dice, cards and spinners.  I always got a certain enjoyment out of understanding the odds or likelihood of certain outcomes in the context of games.  To me data management ties into this as it can represent the likelihood of these events in a understandable form. For this week I had the chance to develop a math question with a photo to accompany it.  So due to the timing I decided to make a probability question.  The question is simple enough, if you were to roll 5 dice and each time you rolled you removed the dice that came up as 1 eventually all dice will be eliminated.  If we were to do this process 10 times how many rolls on average will we have to make?  I quite like this problem as it can easily become a whole lesson where the students break up into groups with chart paper to keep track of their experiment.  I also like it because it lets students use dice as manipulatives.  This activity can also be easily extended to incorporate the data management strand by having students graph their outcomes.  At the end all the students can come together and the whole class can combine the data to come up with a class average.  I have personally designed this lesson with a grade 8 class in mind and as such it best fits those curriculum expectations for data management and probability.  You can read through the curriculum expectations here, for this assignment it would be the first and second specific expectation for probability.

  In class we had the opportunity to experience other data management and probability activities.  My table group was assigned the task of guessing how many times we could toss a ball into a cup and guess the likelihood of those events occurring.  We of course got the opportunity to actually toss the ball into the cup, which was fun.  I quite liked this activity because its not your typical roll rice or toss a coin probability activity.  It nicely incorporated prediction into it by giving us the predictions, with our responsibility being to guess how likely they are to occur.  

  Both of these activities I feel like can be turned into a lesson easily and are defiantly going on my list of things to consider implementing in a class during my placement.  I believe that both activities are great for teaching probability and data management as they allow for the use of engaging manipulatives and allow for collaborative group work.  I always loved learning about probability so I would love to get the chance to try and translate that passion and interest into a lesson.