I was waiting for a group of 12 GEL fifth graders to join me in the computer lab today for an Excel lesson. The students were handed a snack-size M&M package.
One boy looks up at me and asks, “Are we going to be exploring the color distribution between different packages of M&Ms?”
Yep, son, that’s exactly right. An hour later, using the M&M lesson that I featured on Valentine’s Day, student had made educated guesses and graphed personal data into a bar graph. They then collected group data and graphed these into a
circle graph. I was very disappointed to run out of time before we could make some conclusions from the data, but they
saw them as we worked.
One student had only 14 M&Ms, while others had 16-18. This set of M&Ms had significantly fewer reds than other colors. Most bags had clusters of colors, while one had consistent numbers of 3 and 4. This made for a very boring bar graph.
It was a great lesson with students who have had little to know Excel experience. Yet, some of the fundamentals like finding location (cell A8) are familiar from math and social studies. This age group didn’t struggle much with the click and drag directions, as I have had students in the past.
The students left, very excited about the data files they had created. One mentioned that he planned to bring a flash drive so he could perfect it at home. Others talked about finishing details and making their graphs more dynamic— outside of the
GEL class.
When was the last time your students left a class itching to get back to playing with a statistical math problem?