Mathematics in Context Grade 8
Insights into Data
Bias
Activities (8)
Students run a simulation of how a fire will spread through a stand of trees, learning about probability and chaos. Parameters: Forest density, wind direction, size of forest.
Create a game spinner with variable sized sectors to look at experimental and theoretical probabilities. Parameters: Sizes of sectors, number of sectors, number of trials.
Sort colored shapes into a bar graph. Practice sorting by shape or by color. Appropriate for elementary grades. Bar Graph Sorter is one of the Interactivate assessment explorers.
Create a game spinner with one to twelve sectors in order to look at experimental and theoretical probabilities. Parameters: Number of sectors, number of trials.
Students can create box plots for either built-in or user-specified data as well as experiment with outliers. User may choose to use or not use the median for calculation of interquartile range.
View histograms for built-in or user-specified data. Experiment with how the size of the class intervals influences the appearance of the histogram. Parameters: Data sets, class sizes.
Experiment with a simple ecosystem consisting of grass, rabbits, and wolves, learning about probabilities, chaos, and simulation.
Enter two complex numbers (z and c) as ordered pairs of real numbers, then click a button to iterate step by step. The iterates are graphed in the x-y plane and printed out in table form. This is an introduction to the idea of prisoners/escapees in iterated functions and the calculation of fractal Julia sets.