This article describes a hands-on geometric tiling art activity used in two third-grade classes and four fifth-grade classes in a rural public elementary school with class sizes of around 20 students each. The lesson investigates concepts in geometry, number sense, and probability. Examples of student work and takeaways for other teachers…

Popular game shows offer educators the opportunity to develop active-learning exercises that provide students with a real-world connection to analytical reasoning and methods. We describe a classroom assignment developed for quantitative business courses based on the Monty Hall Problem (MHP), a probability puzzle with ties to the long-running…

The Birthday Paradox problem can be investigated either with a carefully constructed spreadsheet (for greatest precision) or a calculator process (for reasonable precision). A number of ways of approaching this problem as a class activity are provided.

This article describes the adaptation and use of the Monopoly® board game as a simple simulator to help introduce the principles of probability and risk. It focusses on teaching experiences in an undergraduate business program and offers a new approach to teaching probability and risk with dice to produce a collaborative simulated gaming…

Most likely a large number of students have heard of the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis), and know that they are a phenomenon in the sky. Although they may not have seen the Northern Lights, most have probably seen other phenomena in the sky, such as a rainbow, shooting star, or super moon. These experiences provide an opportunity for students…

The statistical concept of sampling is often given little direct attention, typically reduced to the mantra "take a random sample". This low resource and adaptable activity demonstrates sampling and explores issues that arise due to biased sampling.

Understanding the roles of random selection and random assignment in experimental design is a central learning objective in most introductory statistics courses. This article describes an activity, appropriate for a high school or introductory statistics course, designed to teach the concepts, values and pitfalls of random selection and assignment…

In the criminal justice system, defendants accused of a crime are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Statistical inference in any context is built on an analogous principle: The null hypothesis--often a hypothesis of "no difference" or "no effect"--is presumed true unless there is sufficient evidence against it. In this…

For over a century, chemists have investigated the rates of chemical reactions using experimental conditions involving huge numbers of molecules. As a consequence, the description of the kinetics of the reaction in terms of average values was good enough for all practical purposes. From the pedagogical point of view, such a description misses the…

This new addition to Math Solutions "Supporting English Language Learners in Math Class series" offers a wealth of lessons and strategies for modifying grades 6-8 instruction. Section I presents an overview of teaching math to English learners: the research, the challenges, the linguistic demands of a math lesson, and specific strategies and…

In the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation funded many research projects for improving statistical education. Many of these stressed the need for classroom activities that illustrate important issues of designing experiments, generating quality data, fitting models, and performing statistical tests. Our paper describes such an activity on…

This booklet suggests activities that reflect findings from recent educational research on curriculum, assessment, and instruction, as well as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Standards pertaining to probability and statistics. Each teacher's guide for the 13 hands-on activities includes objectives stemming from NCTM…

Describes several activities of the Data and Chance program involving third and fourth graders. Students use real-life situations to investigate probability. (MKR)

An activity using a game-related setting is presented for students to investigate probability and statistics.

The probability of selecting two matching socks is discussed. (MNS)