ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK
Have you tried this Mathline probability lesson? If not, you may want to give it a try - "Rock Around the Clock" is a great activity for your middle school math students!
In this lesson,
ROCK AROUND THE CLOCK
Have you tried this Mathline probability lesson? If not, you may want to give it a try - "Rock Around the Clock" is a great activity for your middle school math students!
In this lesson, students are presented with a contest situation: in packs of gum, there are photographs of six different rock stars. The first person to collect all six pictures, AND take them to the radio station that is sponsoring the contest, will win an all-expense-paid trip to any location in the US.
The question posed to the students is this - "What is a reasonable number of packs of gum you should purchase in order to collect all six pictures?" This question is discussed as a class....to think about the fewest number of packs possible, but also to consider how many packs would be reasonable.
Simulating the Contest
The students are put into groups and each group is given materials to simulate the contest. I have used this lesson twice; once I used dice and once I used colored disks (on which I wrote the rock stars' names). When using the dice, students simply roll the die and then record the number that was rolled (each rock star would need to be assigned a number). When using the disks, the students picked a disk from a cup, recorded the star that was